3,857 research outputs found
Authentication of Quantum Messages
Authentication is a well-studied area of classical cryptography: a sender S
and a receiver R sharing a classical private key want to exchange a classical
message with the guarantee that the message has not been modified by any third
party with control of the communication line. In this paper we define and
investigate the authentication of messages composed of quantum states. Assuming
S and R have access to an insecure quantum channel and share a private,
classical random key, we provide a non-interactive scheme that enables S both
to encrypt and to authenticate (with unconditional security) an m qubit message
by encoding it into m+s qubits, where the failure probability decreases
exponentially in the security parameter s. The classical private key is 2m+O(s)
bits. To achieve this, we give a highly efficient protocol for testing the
purity of shared EPR pairs. We also show that any scheme to authenticate
quantum messages must also encrypt them. (In contrast, one can authenticate a
classical message while leaving it publicly readable.) This has two important
consequences: On one hand, it allows us to give a lower bound of 2m key bits
for authenticating m qubits, which makes our protocol asymptotically optimal.
On the other hand, we use it to show that digitally signing quantum states is
impossible, even with only computational security.Comment: 22 pages, LaTeX, uses amssymb, latexsym, time
A quantum key distribution protocol for rapid denial of service detection
We introduce a quantum key distribution protocol designed to expose fake
users that connect to Alice or Bob for the purpose of monopolising the link and
denying service. It inherently resists attempts to exhaust Alice and Bob's
initial shared secret, and is 100% efficient, regardless of the number of
qubits exchanged above the finite key limit. Additionally, secure key can be
generated from two-photon pulses, without having to make any extra
modifications. This is made possible by relaxing the security of BB84 to that
of the quantum-safe block cipher used for day-to-day encryption, meaning the
overall security remains unaffected for useful real-world cryptosystems such as
AES-GCM being keyed with quantum devices.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures. v2: Shifted focus of paper towards DoS and added
protocol 4. v1: Accepted to QCrypt 201
SoK: Cryptographically Protected Database Search
Protected database search systems cryptographically isolate the roles of
reading from, writing to, and administering the database. This separation
limits unnecessary administrator access and protects data in the case of system
breaches. Since protected search was introduced in 2000, the area has grown
rapidly; systems are offered by academia, start-ups, and established companies.
However, there is no best protected search system or set of techniques.
Design of such systems is a balancing act between security, functionality,
performance, and usability. This challenge is made more difficult by ongoing
database specialization, as some users will want the functionality of SQL,
NoSQL, or NewSQL databases. This database evolution will continue, and the
protected search community should be able to quickly provide functionality
consistent with newly invented databases.
At the same time, the community must accurately and clearly characterize the
tradeoffs between different approaches. To address these challenges, we provide
the following contributions:
1) An identification of the important primitive operations across database
paradigms. We find there are a small number of base operations that can be used
and combined to support a large number of database paradigms.
2) An evaluation of the current state of protected search systems in
implementing these base operations. This evaluation describes the main
approaches and tradeoffs for each base operation. Furthermore, it puts
protected search in the context of unprotected search, identifying key gaps in
functionality.
3) An analysis of attacks against protected search for different base
queries.
4) A roadmap and tools for transforming a protected search system into a
protected database, including an open-source performance evaluation platform
and initial user opinions of protected search.Comment: 20 pages, to appear to IEEE Security and Privac
Scalable and Secure Aggregation in Distributed Networks
We consider the problem of computing an aggregation function in a
\emph{secure} and \emph{scalable} way. Whereas previous distributed solutions
with similar security guarantees have a communication cost of , we
present a distributed protocol that requires only a communication complexity of
, which we prove is near-optimal. Our protocol ensures perfect
security against a computationally-bounded adversary, tolerates
malicious nodes for any constant (not
depending on ), and outputs the exact value of the aggregated function with
high probability
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
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