3,513 research outputs found
Letter counting: a stem cell for Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and Statistics
Counting letters in written texts is a very ancient practice. It has
accompanied the development of Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and
Statistics. In Cryptology, counting frequencies of the different characters in
an encrypted message is the basis of the so called frequency analysis method.
In Quantitative Linguistics, the proportion of vowels to consonants in
different languages was studied long before authorship attribution. In
Statistics, the alternation vowel-consonants was the only example that Markov
ever gave of his theory of chained events. A short history of letter counting
is presented. The three domains, Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and
Statistics, are then examined, focusing on the interactions with the other two
fields through letter counting. As a conclusion, the eclectism of past
centuries scholars, their background in humanities, and their familiarity with
cryptograms, are identified as contributing factors to the mutual enrichment
process which is described here
Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography
Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a
wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging
technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems
and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect
use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006)
pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based
cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications
still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable,
insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed
that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the
discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is
to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for
the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid
most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the
importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure
cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having
wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give
a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page
On the Duality of Probing and Fault Attacks
In this work we investigate the problem of simultaneous privacy and integrity
protection in cryptographic circuits. We consider a white-box scenario with a
powerful, yet limited attacker. A concise metric for the level of probing and
fault security is introduced, which is directly related to the capabilities of
a realistic attacker. In order to investigate the interrelation of probing and
fault security we introduce a common mathematical framework based on the
formalism of information and coding theory. The framework unifies the known
linear masking schemes. We proof a central theorem about the properties of
linear codes which leads to optimal secret sharing schemes. These schemes
provide the lower bound for the number of masks needed to counteract an
attacker with a given strength. The new formalism reveals an intriguing duality
principle between the problems of probing and fault security, and provides a
unified view on privacy and integrity protection using error detecting codes.
Finally, we introduce a new class of linear tamper-resistant codes. These are
eligible to preserve security against an attacker mounting simultaneous probing
and fault attacks
On the Complexity of Solving Quadratic Boolean Systems
A fundamental problem in computer science is to find all the common zeroes of
quadratic polynomials in unknowns over . The
cryptanalysis of several modern ciphers reduces to this problem. Up to now, the
best complexity bound was reached by an exhaustive search in
operations. We give an algorithm that reduces the problem to a combination of
exhaustive search and sparse linear algebra. This algorithm has several
variants depending on the method used for the linear algebra step. Under
precise algebraic assumptions on the input system, we show that the
deterministic variant of our algorithm has complexity bounded by
when , while a probabilistic variant of the Las Vegas type
has expected complexity . Experiments on random systems show
that the algebraic assumptions are satisfied with probability very close to~1.
We also give a rough estimate for the actual threshold between our method and
exhaustive search, which is as low as~200, and thus very relevant for
cryptographic applications.Comment: 25 page
Fast algorithms for computing isogenies between elliptic curves
We survey algorithms for computing isogenies between elliptic curves defined
over a field of characteristic either 0 or a large prime. We introduce a new
algorithm that computes an isogeny of degree ( different from the
characteristic) in time quasi-linear with respect to . This is based in
particular on fast algorithms for power series expansion of the Weierstrass
-function and related functions
Solving discrete logarithms on a 170-bit MNT curve by pairing reduction
Pairing based cryptography is in a dangerous position following the
breakthroughs on discrete logarithms computations in finite fields of small
characteristic. Remaining instances are built over finite fields of large
characteristic and their security relies on the fact that the embedding field
of the underlying curve is relatively large. How large is debatable. The aim of
our work is to sustain the claim that the combination of degree 3 embedding and
too small finite fields obviously does not provide enough security. As a
computational example, we solve the DLP on a 170-bit MNT curve, by exploiting
the pairing embedding to a 508-bit, degree-3 extension of the base field.Comment: to appear in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS
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