7,244 research outputs found
Group theory in cryptography
This paper is a guide for the pure mathematician who would like to know more
about cryptography based on group theory. The paper gives a brief overview of
the subject, and provides pointers to good textbooks, key research papers and
recent survey papers in the area.Comment: 25 pages References updated, and a few extra references added. Minor
typographical changes. To appear in Proceedings of Groups St Andrews 2009 in
Bath, U
Using quantum key distribution for cryptographic purposes: a survey
The appealing feature of quantum key distribution (QKD), from a cryptographic
viewpoint, is the ability to prove the information-theoretic security (ITS) of
the established keys. As a key establishment primitive, QKD however does not
provide a standalone security service in its own: the secret keys established
by QKD are in general then used by a subsequent cryptographic applications for
which the requirements, the context of use and the security properties can
vary. It is therefore important, in the perspective of integrating QKD in
security infrastructures, to analyze how QKD can be combined with other
cryptographic primitives. The purpose of this survey article, which is mostly
centered on European research results, is to contribute to such an analysis. We
first review and compare the properties of the existing key establishment
techniques, QKD being one of them. We then study more specifically two generic
scenarios related to the practical use of QKD in cryptographic infrastructures:
1) using QKD as a key renewal technique for a symmetric cipher over a
point-to-point link; 2) using QKD in a network containing many users with the
objective of offering any-to-any key establishment service. We discuss the
constraints as well as the potential interest of using QKD in these contexts.
We finally give an overview of challenges relative to the development of QKD
technology that also constitute potential avenues for cryptographic research.Comment: Revised version of the SECOQC White Paper. Published in the special
issue on QKD of TCS, Theoretical Computer Science (2014), pp. 62-8
On formal verification of arithmetic-based cryptographic primitives
Cryptographic primitives are fundamental for information security: they are
used as basic components for cryptographic protocols or public-key
cryptosystems. In many cases, their security proofs consist in showing that
they are reducible to computationally hard problems. Those reductions can be
subtle and tedious, and thus not easily checkable. On top of the proof
assistant Coq, we had implemented in previous work a toolbox for writing and
checking game-based security proofs of cryptographic primitives. In this paper
we describe its extension with number-theoretic capabilities so that it is now
possible to write and check arithmetic-based cryptographic primitives in our
toolbox. We illustrate our work by machine checking the game-based proofs of
unpredictability of the pseudo-random bit generator of Blum, Blum and Shub, and
semantic security of the public-key cryptographic scheme of Goldwasser and
Micali.Comment: 13 page
Quantum Cryptography Beyond Quantum Key Distribution
Quantum cryptography is the art and science of exploiting quantum mechanical
effects in order to perform cryptographic tasks. While the most well-known
example of this discipline is quantum key distribution (QKD), there exist many
other applications such as quantum money, randomness generation, secure two-
and multi-party computation and delegated quantum computation. Quantum
cryptography also studies the limitations and challenges resulting from quantum
adversaries---including the impossibility of quantum bit commitment, the
difficulty of quantum rewinding and the definition of quantum security models
for classical primitives. In this review article, aimed primarily at
cryptographers unfamiliar with the quantum world, we survey the area of
theoretical quantum cryptography, with an emphasis on the constructions and
limitations beyond the realm of QKD.Comment: 45 pages, over 245 reference
Post Quantum Cryptography from Mutant Prime Knots
By resorting to basic features of topological knot theory we propose a
(classical) cryptographic protocol based on the `difficulty' of decomposing
complex knots generated as connected sums of prime knots and their mutants. The
scheme combines an asymmetric public key protocol with symmetric private ones
and is intrinsecally secure against quantum eavesdropper attacks.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure
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