A Study of Machine Learning Techniques in Cryptography for Cybersecurity

The importance of cybersecurity is on the rise as we have become more technologically dependent on the internet than ever before. Cybersecurity implies the process of protecting and recovering computer systems, networks, devices, and programs from any cyber attack. Cyber attacks are an increasingly sophisticated and evolving danger to our sensitive data, as attackers employ new methods to circumvent traditional security controls. Cryptanalysis is mainly used to crack cryptographic security systems and gain access to the contents of the encrypted messages, even if the key is unknown. It focuses on deciphering the encrypted data as it works with ciphertext, ciphers, and cryptosystems to understand how they work and find techniques for weakening them. For classical cryptanalysis, the recovery of ciphertext is difficult as the time complexity is exponential. The traditional cryptanalysis requires a significant amount of time, known plaintexts, and memory. Machine learning may reduce the computational complexity in cryptanalysis. Machine learning techniques have recently been applied in cryptanalysis, steganography, and other data-securityrelated applications. Deep learning is an advanced field of machine learning which mainly uses deep neural network architecture. Nowadays, deep learning techniques are usually explored extensively to solve many challenging problems of artificial intelligence. But not much work has been done on deep learning-based cryptanalysis. This paper attempts to summarize various machine learning based approaches for cryptanalysis along with discussions on the scope of application of deep learning techniques in cryptography.