Components of Cryptanalysis

Question

What are different components of Cryptanalysis. I can't seem to find them. Are they the same as Cryptosystem or is there any difference.

Answer 1

Disclaimer: this answer is opinion based.

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TL;DR: The question does not really make sense. Because you cannot put things into boxes like that.

The best way to make you understand it is to make an analogy. Cryptosystem is to Chess what Cryptanalysis is to Chess Games Strategy/Reviewing.

As you define a Cryptosystem with the following components:

• Plaintext
• Encryption Algorithm
• Ciphertext
• Decryption Algorithm
• Encryption Key
• Decryption Key

You can define Chess with:

• a 8x8 board
• 16 white pieces (King, Queen, 2 Rooks, 2 Bishops, 2 Knights, 8 pawns)
• 16 black pieces idem.
• a set of rules

And you can see the review and strategy as:

• Openings moves and tactics (Alekhine's Defence, Caro-Kann Defence, King's Gambit...),
• Midgames moves and tactics,
• Endgames and tactics,
• Mat in 3 (and more),
• pinning,
• forks,
• discovered attacks
• etc.

Cryptanalysis will be the art to look at a cryptosystem, find it's weaknesses and how to improve it:

• differential/linear/integral Cryptanalysis,
• boomerang attacks, related key attacks, impossible differentials,
• birthday bounds,
• Meat-in-the-middle attack,
• Game-based proofs,
• Shor's/Simon's/Grover's algorithm
• etc

Answer 2

A cryptanalysis is somewhat reverse process of cryptography like in cryptography we try to hide the information and in the cryptanalysis, we test weakness of a cryptosystem. so components of cryptanalysis can be said

Passive cryptanalysis: where only observation is done of the cryptosystem to find the weakness.

Active cryptanalysis: where a mathematical approach is used to overcome (or to reduce) the difficulty to solve the crypto problem.