Cryptography is the science of constructing protocols that resist adversarial behavior. This document maps REF's operations to the six primary subfields of modern cryptography and establishes the shared vocabulary for evaluating the protocol's architecture.
Modern cryptography encompasses six primary subfields, each addressing a distinct security property. REF's architecture draws on five of these subfields. The sixth — encryption, which provides confidentiality — is not a core protocol mechanism.
The science of constructing and analyzing protocols that resist adversarial behavior
AES-256-GCM is deployed for standard data-at-rest and TLS transit protection, as in any production system. However, encryption does not appear in the REF protocol's core operations — token generation, proof construction, consensus, or verification. The distinction is between infrastructure encryption (universal) and protocol-level cryptographic operations (REF-specific).
REF's protocol-level operations are signing, committing, proving, verifying, and reaching consensus. Each is a cryptographic operation. None is encryption.
The operations that make it impossible to review without purchasing are signing, committing, proving, and reaching consensus. These four verbs define the protocol boundary. Encryption operates below this boundary, at the infrastructure layer, where it serves the same function it serves in any secure system.
REF's taxonomic position is standard. Several foundational protocols in wide deployment are universally described as "cryptographic" despite relying primarily on signatures, hashing, and consensus rather than encryption.
In each case, the term "cryptographic" refers to the broader field — the use of mathematically grounded primitives to resist adversarial behavior — not specifically to encryption. REF follows this established convention.