Bits of Security
Here’s a blog I haven’t written... Around a few weeks ago whilst I was out there working for the midterm exam for comp6441...
I got myself familiar with the concept of bits of Security...
Here’s how I would explain it to someone who has no initial idea of what it means,
Let’s say there is some sort of a protocol which identifies unique individuals. Each individual has their own unique ID which is one out of a million possible IDs. If we wanted to guess his unique ID, in the worst-case scenario, we’d have to guess a million IDs to get his one. Now we’d have to ‘Brute force’ through the million ID values. To represent a million unique values, we would need a certain number of bits. The number of bits would be called Bits of Security. example: To represent 10 numerical values you’d need 4 bits (0000 - 1010)
If a protocol can accommodate for a million possible IDs then it would have 20 bits of security.
If a protocol has 48 bits of security, it could accommodate for (2^48) possible values that would need to be guessed to be brute-forced.