Question

I am getting references in a paper on genetic programming, to a “protected division” operation. When I google this, i get mostly papers on genetic programming and various results related to cryptography, but none that explain what it actually is. Does anybody know?

Answer 1

Protected division (often notated with %) checks to see if its second
argument is 0. If so, % typically returns the value 1 (regardless of
the value of the first argument).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming

In cryptography it doesn’t seem to be well-defined, but the top google hit is for protecting against side channel attacks (in that case, via power use – you can guess what numbers are being used in the division by looking at the power consumption of the hardware doing the encryption) http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1250996 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.9.7298&rep=rep1&type=pdf