Advantage (cryptography)

In cryptography, an adversary's advantage is a measure of how successfully it can attack a cryptographic algorithm, by distinguishing it from an idealized version of that type of algorithm. Note that in this context, the "adversary" is itself an algorithm and not a person. A cryptographic algorithm is considered secure if no adversary has a non-negligible advantage, subject to specified bounds on the adversary's computational resources (see concrete security). "Negligible" usually means "within O(2^−p)" where p is a security parameter associated with the algorithm. For example, p might be the number of bits in a block cipher's key.