Security parameter

In cryptography, a security parameter is a way of measuring of how "hard" it is for an adversary to break a cryptographic scheme. There are two main types of security parameter: computational and statistical, often denoted by and , respectively. Roughly speaking, the computational security parameter is a measure for the input size of the computational problem on which the cryptographic scheme is based, which determines its computational complexity, whereas the statistical security parameter is a measure of the probability with which an adversary can break the scheme.