[1]https://www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-identify-master-problem-underlying
-all-cryptography-20220406/


   In 1868, the mathematician Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis
   Carroll) proclaimed that an encryption scheme called the Vigenère
   cipher was “unbreakable.” He had no proof, but he had compelling
   reasons for his belief, since mathematicians had been trying
   unsuccessfully to break the cipher for more than three centuries.

   There was just one small problem: A German infantry officer named
   Friedrich Kasiski had, in fact, broken it five years earlier, in a book
   that garnered little notice at the time.

   Cryptographers have been playing this game of cat and mouse, creating
   and breaking ciphers, for as long as people have been sending secret
   information. “For thousands of years, people [have been] trying to
   figure out, ‘Can we break the cycle?’” said [2]Rafael Pass, a
   cryptographer at Cornell Tech and Cornell University.

   Five decades ago, cryptographers took a huge step in this direction.
   They showed that it’s possible to create provably secure ciphers if you
   have access to a single ingredient: a “one-way function,” something
   that’s easy to carry out but hard to reverse. Since then, researchers
   have devised a wide array of candidate one-way functions, from simple
   operations based on multiplication to more complicated geometric or
   logarithmic procedures.

   Today, the internet protocols for tasks like transmitting credit card
   numbers and digital signatures depend on these functions. “Most of the
   crypto that is used in the real world is something that can be based on
   one-way functions,” said [3]Yuval Ishai, a cryptographer at the
   Technion in Haifa, Israel.

   ....

References

   1. https://www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-identify-master-problem-underlying-all-cryptography-20220406/
   2. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~rafael/
   3. https://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~yuvali/