2,756 research outputs found
Efficient One-Way Secret-Key Agreement and Private Channel Coding via Polarization
We introduce explicit schemes based on the polarization phenomenon for the
tasks of one-way secret key agreement from common randomness and private
channel coding. For the former task, we show how to use common randomness and
insecure one-way communication to obtain a strongly secure key such that the
key construction has a complexity essentially linear in the blocklength and the
rate at which the key is produced is optimal, i.e., equal to the one-way
secret-key rate. For the latter task, we present a private channel coding
scheme that achieves the secrecy capacity using the condition of strong secrecy
and whose encoding and decoding complexity are again essentially linear in the
blocklength.Comment: 18.1 pages, 2 figures, 2 table
Quantum Cryptography
Quantum cryptography could well be the first application of quantum mechanics
at the individual quanta level. The very fast progress in both theory and
experiments over the recent years are reviewed, with emphasis on open questions
and technological issues.Comment: 55 pages, 32 figures; to appear in Reviews of Modern Physic
Quantum cryptography: key distribution and beyond
Uniquely among the sciences, quantum cryptography has driven both
foundational research as well as practical real-life applications. We review
the progress of quantum cryptography in the last decade, covering quantum key
distribution and other applications.Comment: It's a review on quantum cryptography and it is not restricted to QK
Polar Coding for Secret-Key Generation
Practical implementations of secret-key generation are often based on
sequential strategies, which handle reliability and secrecy in two successive
steps, called reconciliation and privacy amplification. In this paper, we
propose an alternative approach based on polar codes that jointly deals with
reliability and secrecy. Specifically, we propose secret-key capacity-achieving
polar coding schemes for the following models: (i) the degraded binary
memoryless source (DBMS) model with rate-unlimited public communication, (ii)
the DBMS model with one-way rate-limited public communication, (iii) the 1-to-m
broadcast model and (iv) the Markov tree model with uniform marginals. For
models (i) and (ii) our coding schemes remain valid for non-degraded sources,
although they may not achieve the secret-key capacity. For models (i), (ii) and
(iii), our schemes rely on pre-shared secret seed of negligible rate; however,
we provide special cases of these models for which no seed is required.
Finally, we show an application of our results to secrecy and privacy for
biometric systems. We thus provide the first examples of low-complexity
secret-key capacity-achieving schemes that are able to handle vector
quantization for model (ii), or multiterminal communication for models (iii)
and (iv).Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information
Theory; parts of the results were presented at the 2013 IEEE Information
Theory Worksho
Strong secrecy on a class of degraded broadcast channels using polar codes
Two polar coding schemes are proposed for the degraded
broadcast channel under different reliability and secrecy
requirements. In these settings, the transmitter wishes to send
multiple messages to a set of legitimate receivers keeping them
masked from a set of eavesdroppers, and individual channels are
assumed to gradually degrade in such a way that each legitimate
receiver has a better channel than any eavesdropper. The layered
decoding structure requires receivers with better channel quality
to reliably decode more messages, while the layered secrecy
structure requires eavesdroppers with worse channel quality to
be kept ignorant of more messages.Postprint (author's final draft
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
Fundamental rate-loss tradeoff for optical quantum key distribution
Since 1984, various optical quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols have
been proposed and examined. In all of them, the rate of secret key generation
decays exponentially with distance. A natural and fundamental question is then
whether there are yet-to-be discovered optical QKD protocols (without quantum
repeaters) that could circumvent this rate-distance tradeoff. This paper
provides a major step towards answering this question. We show that the
secret-key-agreement capacity of a lossy and noisy optical channel assisted by
unlimited two-way public classical communication is limited by an upper bound
that is solely a function of the channel loss, regardless of how much optical
power the protocol may use. Our result has major implications for understanding
the secret-key-agreement capacity of optical channels---a long-standing open
problem in optical quantum information theory---and strongly suggests a real
need for quantum repeaters to perform QKD at high rates over long distances.Comment: 9+4 pages, 3 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1310.012
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