Why is only XOR used in cryptographic algorithms, and other logic gates like OR, AND, and NOR are not used?
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Why is only XOR used in cryptographic algorithms, and other logic gates like OR, AND, and NOR are not used?
It isn’t exactly true to say that the logical operation XOR is the only one used throughout all cryptography, however it is the only two way encryption where it is used exclusively.
Here is that explained:
Imagine you have a string of binary digits
10101and you XOR the string
10111with it you get00010now your original string is encoded and the second string becomes your key
if you XOR your key with your encoded string you get your original string back.
XOR allows you to easily encrypt and decrypt a string, the other logic operations don’t.
If you have a longer string you can repeat your key until its long enough
for example if your string was
1010010011then you’d simple write your key twice and it would become1011110111and XOR it with the new stringHere’s a wikipedia link on the XOR cipher.