Optimal Key Consensus in Presence of Noise

In this work, we abstract some key ingredients in previous key exchange protocols based on LWE and its variants, by introducing and formalizing the building tool, referred to as key consensus (KC) and its asymmetric variant AKC. KC and AKC allow two communicating parties to reach consensus from close values obtained by some secure information exchange. We then discover upper bounds on parameters for any KC and AKC. KC and AKC are fundamental to lattice based cryptography, in the sense that a list of cryptographic primitives based on LWE and its variants (including key exchange, public-key encryption, and more) can be modularly constructed from them. As a conceptual contribution, this much simplifies the design and analysis of these cryptosystems in the future. We then design and analyze both general and highly practical KC and AKC schemes, which are referred to as OKCN and AKCN respectively for presentation simplicity. Based on KC and AKC, we present generic constructions of key exchange (KE) from LWR, LWE, RLWE and MLWE. The generic construction allows versatile instantiations with our OKCN and AKCN schemes, for which we elaborate on evaluating and choosing the concrete parameters in order to achieve a well-balanced performance among security, computational cost, bandwidth efficiency, error rate, and operation simplicity

Graph spectra and modal dynamics of oscillatory networks

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2003.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-191).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Our research focuses on developing design-oriented analytical tools that enable us to better understand how a network comprising dynamic and static elements behaves when it is set in oscillatory motion, and how the interconnection topology relates to the spectral properties of the system. Such oscillatory networks are ubiquitous, extending from miniature electronic circuits to large-scale power networks. We tap into the rich mathematical literature on graph spectra, and develop theoretical extensions applicable to networks containing nodes that have finite nonnegative weights-including nodes of zero weight, which occur naturally in the context of power networks. We develop new spectral graph-theoretic results spawned by our engineering interests, including generalizations (to node-weighted graphs) of various structure-based eigenvalue bounds. The central results of this thesis concern the phenomenon of dynamic coherency, in which clusters of vertices move in unison relative to each other. Our research exposes the relation between coherency and network structure and parameters. We study both approximate and exact dynamic coherency. Our new understanding of coherency leads to a number of results. We expose a conceptual link between theoretical coherency and the confinement of an oscillatory mode to a node cluster. We show how the eigenvalues of a coherent graph relate to those of its constituent clusters.(cont.) We use our eigenvalue expressions to devise a novel graph design algorithm; given a set of vertices (of finite positive weight) and a desired set of eigenvalues, we construct a graph that meets the specifications. Our novel graph design algorithm has two interesting corollaries: the graph eigenvectors have regions of support that monotonically decrease toward faster modes, and we can construct graphs that exactly meet our generalized eigenvalue bounds. It is our hope that the results of this thesis will contribute to a better understanding of the links between structure and dynamics in oscillatory networks.by Babak Ayazifar.Ph.D