1,977 research outputs found
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
Small-Box Cryptography
One of the ultimate goals of symmetric-key cryptography is to find a rigorous theoretical framework for building block ciphers from small components, such as cryptographic S-boxes, and then argue why iterating such small components for sufficiently many rounds would yield a secure construction. Unfortunately, a fundamental obstacle towards reaching this goal comes from the fact that traditional security proofs cannot get security beyond 2^{-n}, where n is the size of the corresponding component.
As a result, prior provably secure approaches - which we call "big-box cryptography" - always made n larger than the security parameter, which led to several problems: (a) the design was too coarse to really explain practical constructions, as (arguably) the most interesting design choices happening when instantiating such "big-boxes" were completely abstracted out; (b) the theoretically predicted number of rounds for the security of this approach was always dramatically smaller than in reality, where the "big-box" building block could not be made as ideal as required by the proof. For example, Even-Mansour (and, more generally, key-alternating) ciphers completely ignored the substitution-permutation network (SPN) paradigm which is at the heart of most real-world implementations of such ciphers.
In this work, we introduce a novel paradigm for justifying the security of existing block ciphers, which we call small-box cryptography. Unlike the "big-box" paradigm, it allows one to go much deeper inside the existing block cipher constructions, by only idealizing a small (and, hence, realistic!) building block of very small size n, such as an 8-to-32-bit S-box. It then introduces a clean and rigorous mixture of proofs and hardness conjectures which allow one to lift traditional, and seemingly meaningless, "at most 2^{-n}" security proofs for reduced-round idealized variants of the existing block ciphers, into meaningful, full-round security justifications of the actual ciphers used in the real world.
We then apply our framework to the analysis of SPN ciphers (e.g, generalizations of AES), getting quite reasonable and plausible concrete hardness estimates for the resulting ciphers. We also apply our framework to the design of stream ciphers. Here, however, we focus on the simplicity of the resulting construction, for which we managed to find a direct "big-box"-style security justification, under a well studied and widely believed eXact Linear Parity with Noise (XLPN) assumption.
Overall, we hope that our work will initiate many follow-up results in the area of small-box cryptography
Simulating Auxiliary Inputs, Revisited
For any pair of correlated random variables we can think of as a
randomized function of . Provided that is short, one can make this
function computationally efficient by allowing it to be only approximately
correct. In folklore this problem is known as \emph{simulating auxiliary
inputs}. This idea of simulating auxiliary information turns out to be a
powerful tool in computer science, finding applications in complexity theory,
cryptography, pseudorandomness and zero-knowledge. In this paper we revisit
this problem, achieving the following results:
\begin{enumerate}[(a)] We discuss and compare efficiency of known results,
finding the flaw in the best known bound claimed in the TCC'14 paper "How to
Fake Auxiliary Inputs". We present a novel boosting algorithm for constructing
the simulator. Our technique essentially fixes the flaw. This boosting proof is
of independent interest, as it shows how to handle "negative mass" issues when
constructing probability measures in descent algorithms. Our bounds are much
better than bounds known so far. To make the simulator
-indistinguishable we need the complexity in time/circuit size, which is better by a
factor compared to previous bounds. In particular, with our
technique we (finally) get meaningful provable security for the EUROCRYPT'09
leakage-resilient stream cipher instantiated with a standard 256-bit block
cipher, like .Comment: Some typos present in the previous version have been correcte
Elastic Block Ciphers: Method, Security and Instantiations
We introduce the concept of an elastic block cipher which refers to stretching the supported block size of a block cipher to any length up to twice the original block size while incurring a computational workload that is proportional to the block size. Our method uses the round function of an existing block cipher as a black box and inserts it into a substitution- permutation network. Our method is designed to enable us to form a reduction between the elastic and the original versions of the cipher. Using this reduction, we prove that the elastic version of a cipher is secure against key-recovery attacks if the original cipher is secure against such attacks. We note that while reduction-based proofs of security are a cornerstone of cryptographic analysis, they are typical when complete components are used as sub-components in a larger design. We are not aware of the use of such techniques in the case of concrete block cipher designs. We demonstrate the general applicability of the elastic block cipher method by constructing examples from existing block ciphers: AES, Camellia, MISTY1, and RC6. We compare the performance of the elastic versions to that of the original versions and evaluate the elastic versions using statistical tests measuring the randomness of the ciphertext. We also use our examples to demonstrate the concept of a generic key schedule for block ciphers
Quantum key distribution and cryptography: a survey
I will try to partially answer, based on a review on recent work, the following question:
Can QKD and more generally quantum information be useful to cover some practical security requirements in current (and future) IT infrastructures ?
I will in particular cover the following topics
- practical performances of QKD
- QKD network deployment - SECOQC project
- Capabilities of QKD as a cryptographic primitive - comparative advantage with other solution, in order to cover practical security requirements
- Quantum information and Side-channels
- QKD security assurance
- Thoughts about "real" Post-Quantum Cryptograph
09031 Abstracts Collection -- Symmetric Cryptography
From 11.01.09 to 16.01.09, the Seminar 09031 in
``Symmetric Cryptography \u27\u27 was held
in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics.
During the seminar, several participants presented their current
research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of
the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of
seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section
describes the seminar topics and goals in general.
Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available
Semantic Security and Indistinguishability in the Quantum World
At CRYPTO 2013, Boneh and Zhandry initiated the study of quantum-secure
encryption. They proposed first indistinguishability definitions for the
quantum world where the actual indistinguishability only holds for classical
messages, and they provide arguments why it might be hard to achieve a stronger
notion. In this work, we show that stronger notions are achievable, where the
indistinguishability holds for quantum superpositions of messages. We
investigate exhaustively the possibilities and subtle differences in defining
such a quantum indistinguishability notion for symmetric-key encryption
schemes. We justify our stronger definition by showing its equivalence to novel
quantum semantic-security notions that we introduce. Furthermore, we show that
our new security definitions cannot be achieved by a large class of ciphers --
those which are quasi-preserving the message length. On the other hand, we
provide a secure construction based on quantum-resistant pseudorandom
permutations; this construction can be used as a generic transformation for
turning a large class of encryption schemes into quantum indistinguishable and
hence quantum semantically secure ones. Moreover, our construction is the first
completely classical encryption scheme shown to be secure against an even
stronger notion of indistinguishability, which was previously known to be
achievable only by using quantum messages and arbitrary quantum encryption
circuits.Comment: 37 pages, 2 figure
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