1,541 research outputs found
Corrections of the NIST Statistical Test Suite for Randomness
It is well known that the NIST statistical test suite was used for the
evaluation of AES candidate algorithms. We have found that the test setting of
Discrete Fourier Transform test and Lempel-Ziv test of this test suite are
wrong. We give four corrections of mistakes in the test settings. This suggests
that re-evaluation of the test results should be needed
The Quantum Frontier
The success of the abstract model of computation, in terms of bits, logical
operations, programming language constructs, and the like, makes it easy to
forget that computation is a physical process. Our cherished notions of
computation and information are grounded in classical mechanics, but the
physics underlying our world is quantum. In the early 80s researchers began to
ask how computation would change if we adopted a quantum mechanical, instead of
a classical mechanical, view of computation. Slowly, a new picture of
computation arose, one that gave rise to a variety of faster algorithms, novel
cryptographic mechanisms, and alternative methods of communication. Small
quantum information processing devices have been built, and efforts are
underway to build larger ones. Even apart from the existence of these devices,
the quantum view on information processing has provided significant insight
into the nature of computation and information, and a deeper understanding of
the physics of our universe and its connections with computation.
We start by describing aspects of quantum mechanics that are at the heart of
a quantum view of information processing. We give our own idiosyncratic view of
a number of these topics in the hopes of correcting common misconceptions and
highlighting aspects that are often overlooked. A number of the phenomena
described were initially viewed as oddities of quantum mechanics. It was
quantum information processing, first quantum cryptography and then, more
dramatically, quantum computing, that turned the tables and showed that these
oddities could be put to practical effect. It is these application we describe
next. We conclude with a section describing some of the many questions left for
future work, especially the mysteries surrounding where the power of quantum
information ultimately comes from.Comment: Invited book chapter for Computation for Humanity - Information
Technology to Advance Society to be published by CRC Press. Concepts
clarified and style made more uniform in version 2. Many thanks to the
referees for their suggestions for improvement
Composability in quantum cryptography
In this article, we review several aspects of composability in the context of
quantum cryptography. The first part is devoted to key distribution. We discuss
the security criteria that a quantum key distribution protocol must fulfill to
allow its safe use within a larger security application (e.g., for secure
message transmission). To illustrate the practical use of composability, we
show how to generate a continuous key stream by sequentially composing rounds
of a quantum key distribution protocol. In a second part, we take a more
general point of view, which is necessary for the study of cryptographic
situations involving, for example, mutually distrustful parties. We explain the
universal composability framework and state the composition theorem which
guarantees that secure protocols can securely be composed to larger
applicationsComment: 18 pages, 2 figure
Barrel Shifter Physical Unclonable Function Based Encryption
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are circuits designed to extract
physical randomness from the underlying circuit. This randomness depends on the
manufacturing process. It differs for each device enabling chip-level
authentication and key generation applications. We present a protocol utilizing
a PUF for secure data transmission. Parties each have a PUF used for encryption
and decryption; this is facilitated by constraining the PUF to be commutative.
This framework is evaluated with a primitive permutation network - a barrel
shifter. Physical randomness is derived from the delay of different shift
paths. Barrel shifter (BS) PUF captures the delay of different shift paths.
This delay is entangled with message bits before they are sent across an
insecure channel. BS-PUF is implemented using transmission gates; their
characteristics ensure same-chip reproducibility, a necessary property of PUFs.
Post-layout simulations of a common centroid layout 8-level barrel shifter in
0.13 {\mu}m technology assess uniqueness, stability and randomness properties.
BS-PUFs pass all selected NIST statistical randomness tests. Stability similar
to Ring Oscillator (RO) PUFs under environment variation is shown. Logistic
regression of 100,000 plaintext-ciphertext pairs (PCPs) failed to successfully
model BS- PUF behavior
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