Disjoint difference families and their applications

Difference sets and their generalisations to difference families arise from the study of designs and many other applications. Here we give a brief survey of some of these applications, noting in particular the diverse definitions of difference families and the variations in priorities in constructions. We propose a definition of disjoint difference families that encompasses these variations and allows a comparison of the similarities and disparities. We then focus on two constructions of disjoint difference families arising from frequency hopping sequences and showed that they are in fact the same. We conclude with a discussion of the notion of equivalence for frequency hopping sequences and for disjoint difference families

From Information Theory Puzzles in Deletion Channels to Deniability in Quantum Cryptography

Research questions, originally rooted in quantum key exchange (QKE), have branched off into independent lines of inquiry ranging from information theory to fundamental physics. In a similar vein, the first part of this thesis is dedicated to information theory problems in deletion channels that arose in the context of QKE. From the output produced by a memoryless deletion channel with a uniformly random input of known length n, one obtains a posterior distribution on the channel input. The difference between the Shannon entropy of this distribution and that of the uniform prior measures the amount of information about the channel input which is conveyed by the output of length m. We first conjecture on the basis of experimental data that the entropy of the posterior is minimized by the constant strings 000..., 111... and maximized by the alternating strings 0101..., 1010.... Among other things, we derive analytic expressions for minimal entropy and propose alternative approaches for tackling the entropy extremization problem. We address a series of closely related combinatorial problems involving binary (sub/super)-sequences and prove the original minimal entropy conjecture for the special cases of single and double deletions using clustering techniques and a run-length encoding of strings. The entropy analysis culminates in a fundamental characterization of the extremal entropic cases in terms of the distribution of embeddings. We confirm the minimization conjecture in the asymptotic limit using results from hidden word statistics by showing how the analytic-combinatorial methods of Flajolet, Szpankowski and Vallée, relying on generating functions, can be applied to resolve the case of fixed output length and n → ∞. In the second part, we revisit the notion of deniability in QKE, a topic that remains largely unexplored. In a work by Donald Beaver it is argued that QKE protocols are not necessarily deniable due to an eavesdropping attack that limits key equivocation. We provide more insight into the nature of this attack and discuss how it extends to other prepare-and-measure QKE schemes such as QKE obtained from uncloneable encryption. We adopt the framework for quantum authenticated key exchange developed by Mosca et al. and extend it to introduce the notion of coercer-deniable QKE, formalized in terms of the indistinguishability of real and fake coercer views. We also elaborate on the differences between our model and the standard simulation-based definition of deniable key exchange in the classical setting. We establish a connection between the concept of covert communication and deniability by applying results from a work by Arrazola and Scarani on obtaining covert quantum communication and covert QKE to propose a simple construction for coercer-deniable QKE. We prove the deniability of this scheme via a reduction to the security of covert QKE. We relate deniability to fundamental concepts in quantum information theory and suggest a generic approach based on entanglement distillation for achieving information-theoretic deniability, followed by an analysis of other closely related results such as the relation between the impossibility of unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment and deniability. Finally, we present an efficient coercion-resistant and quantum-secure voting scheme, based on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and recent advances in various FHE primitives such as hashing, zero-knowledge proofs of correct decryption, verifiable shuffles and threshold FHE

When are Fuzzy Extractors Possible?

Fuzzy extractors (Dodis et al., SIAM J. Computing 2008) convert repeated noisy readings of a high-entropy secret into the same uniformly distributed key. A minimum condition for the security of the key is the hardness of guessing a value that is similar to the secret, because the fuzzy extractor converts such a guess to the key. We codify this quantify this property in a new notion called fuzzy min-entropy. We ask: is fuzzy min-entropy sufficient to build fuzzy extractors? We provide two answers for different settings. 1) If the algorithms have precise knowledge of the probability distribution $W$ that defines the noisy source is a sufficient condition for information-theoretic key extraction from $W$. 2) A more ambitious goal is to design a single extractor that works for all possible sources. This more ambitious goal is impossible: there is a family of sources with high fuzzy min-entropy for which no single fuzzy extractor is secure. This is true in three settings: a) for standard fuzzy extractors, b) for fuzzy extractors that are allowed to sometimes be wrong, c) and for secure sketches, which are the main ingredient of most fuzzy extractor constructions

Decoding and constructions of codes in rank and Hamming metric

As coding theory plays an important role in data transmission, decoding algorithms for new families of error correction codes are of great interest. This dissertation is dedicated to the decoding algorithms for new families of maximum rank distance (MRD) codes including additive generalized twisted Gabidulin (AGTG) codes and Trombetti-Zhou (TZ) codes, decoding algorithm for Gabidulin codes beyond half the minimum distance and also encoding and decoding algorithms for some new optimal rank metric codes with restrictions. We propose an interpolation-based decoding algorithm to decode AGTG codes where the decoding problem is reduced to the problem of solving a projective polynomial equation of the form q(x) = xqu+1 +bx+a = 0 for a,b ∈ Fqm. We investigate the zeros of q(x) when gcd(u,m)=1 and proposed a deterministic algorithm to solve a linearized polynomial equation which has a close connection to the zeros of q(x). An efficient polynomial-time decoding algorithm is proposed for TZ codes. The interpolation-based decoding approach transforms the decoding problem of TZ codes to the problem of solving a quadratic polynomial equation. Two new communication models are defined and using our models we manage to decode Gabidulin codes beyond half the minimum distance by one unit. Our models also allow us to improve the complexity for decoding GTG and AGTG codes. Besides working on MRD codes, we also work on restricted optimal rank metric codes including symmetric, alternating and Hermitian rank metric codes. Both encoding and decoding algorithms for these optimal families are proposed. In all the decoding algorithms presented in this thesis, the properties of Dickson matrix and the BM algorithm play crucial roles. We also touch two problems in Hamming metric. For the first problem, some cryptographic properties of Welch permutation polynomial are investigated and we use these properties to determine the weight distribution of a binary linear codes with few weights. For the second one, we introduce two new subfamilies for maximum weight spectrum codes with respect to their weight distribution and then we investigate their properties.Doktorgradsavhandlin