Symmetric Public-Key Encryption

Public-key encryption would seem to be inherently asymmetric. in that only messages sent to a user can be encrypted using his public key. We demonstrate that the use of interactive protocols for sending encrypted messages enables a symmetric use of public keys; we give cryptographic protocols for the following tasks: 1. Probabilistic encryption, using the same public key, both of messages that are sent to a particular user as well as of messages that the user sends to others, without compromising the key. We propose a public-key cryptosystem based on these protocols which has only one key, owned by a cryptographic server. 2. Authentication both of the sender and of the receiver of a probabilistically encrypted message. 3. Probabilistic encryption which is provably secure against both chosen-message and chosen-ciphertext attack

Secure self-calibrating quantum random bit generator

Random bit generators (RBGs) are key components of a variety of information processing applications ranging from simulations to cryptography. In particular, cryptographic systems require "strong" RBGs that produce high-entropy bit sequences, but traditional software pseudo-RBGs have very low entropy content and therefore are relatively weak for cryptography. Hardware RBGs yield entropy from chaotic or quantum physical systems and therefore are expected to exhibit high entropy, but in current implementations their exact entropy content is unknown. Here we report a quantum random bit generator (QRBG) that harvests entropy by measuring single-photon and entangled two-photon polarization states. We introduce and implement a quantum tomographic method to measure a lower bound on the "min-entropy" of the system, and we employ this value to distill a truly random bit sequence. This approach is secure: even if an attacker takes control of the source of optical states, a secure random sequence can be distilled.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Parallel generation of c[r]yptographically strong pseudo-random sequences

The operational disadvantages of perfectly secure cipher systems has led to the development of practically secure stream cipher systems. The security of such cipher systems depend on the strength of the keystream. In order to examine the strength of a sequence two different types of criteria are considered. Statistical tests, are designed to assess how a sequence with a particular property behaves randomly. Complexity measures, are applied to determine the complexity, or equivalently the unpredictability of a sequence. Sequences obtained by LFSR are considered as building blocks of pseudo-random (PR) sequence generators. Transformations on the decimal expansion of irrational numbers is an alternative method for generating PR sequences, which are studied and some encouraging results are reported