Studying Maximum Information Leakage Using Karush-Kuhn-Tucker Conditions

When studying the information leakage in programs or protocols, a natural question arises: "what is the worst case scenario?". This problem of identifying the maximal leakage can be seen as a channel capacity problem in the information theoretical sense. In this paper, by combining two powerful theories: Information Theory and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions, we demonstrate a very general solution to the channel capacity problem. Examples are given to show how our solution can be applied to practical contexts of programs and anonymity protocols, and how this solution generalizes previous approaches to this problem

Probability of Error in Information-Hiding Protocols

International audienceRandomized protocols for hiding private information can fruitfully be regarded as noisy channels in the information-theoretic sense, and the inference of the concealed information can be regarded as a hypothesis-testing problem. We consider the Bayesian approach to the problem, and investigate the probability of error associated to the inference when the MAP (Maximum Aposteriori Probability) decision rule is adopted. Our main result is a constructive characterization of a convex base of the probability of error, which allows us to compute its maximum value (over all possible input distributions), and to identify upper bounds for it in terms of simple functions. As a side result, we are able to improve substantially the Hellman-Raviv and the Santhi-Vardy bounds expressed in terms of conditional entropy. We then discuss an application of our methodology to the Crowds protocol, and in particular we show how to compute the bounds on the probability that an adversary breaks anonymity

Secure Anonymous Conferencing in Quantum Networks

Users of quantum networks can securely communicate via so-called (quantum) conference key agreement—making their identities publicly known. In certain circumstances, however, communicating users demand anonymity. Here, we introduce a security framework for anonymous conference key agreement with different levels of anonymity, which is inspired by the ε-security of quantum key distribution. We present efficient and noise-tolerant protocols exploiting multipartite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states and prove their security in the finite-key regime. We analyze the performance of our protocols in noisy and lossy quantum networks and compare with protocols that only use bipartite entanglement to achieve the same functionalities. Our simulations show that GHZ-based protocols can outperform protocols based on bipartite entanglement and that the advantage increases for protocols with stronger anonymity requirements. Our results strongly advocate the use of multipartite entanglement for cryptographic tasks involving several users

Compositional Methods for Information-Hiding

International audienceProtocols for information-hiding often use randomized primitives to obfuscate the link between the observables and the information to be protected. The degree of protection provided by a protocol can be expressed in terms of the probability of error associated to the inference of the secret information. We consider a probabilistic process calculus approach to the specification of such protocols, and we study how the operators affect the probability of error. In particular, we characterize constructs that have the property of not decreasing the degree of protection, and that can therefore be considered safe in the modular construction of protocols. As a case study, we apply these techniques to the Dining Cryptographers, and we are able to derive a generalization of Chaum's strong anonymity result