1,085 research outputs found
From quantum-codemaking to quantum code-breaking
This is a semi-popular overview of quantum entanglement as an important
physical resource in the field of data security and quantum computing. After a
brief outline of entanglement's key role in philosophical debates about the
meaning of quantum mechanics I describe its current impact on both cryptography
and cryptanalysis. The paper is based on the lecture given at the conference
"Geometric Issues in the Foundations of Science" (Oxford, June 1996) in honor
of Roger Penrose.Comment: 21 pages, LaTeX2e, psfig, multi3.cls, 1 eps figur
Making Existential-Unforgeable Signatures Strongly Unforgeable in the Quantum Random-Oracle Model
Strongly unforgeable signature schemes provide a more stringent security
guarantee than the standard existential unforgeability. It requires that not
only forging a signature on a new message is hard, it is infeasible as well to
produce a new signature on a message for which the adversary has seen valid
signatures before. Strongly unforgeable signatures are useful both in practice
and as a building block in many cryptographic constructions.
This work investigates a generic transformation that compiles any
existential-unforgeable scheme into a strongly unforgeable one, which was
proposed by Teranishi et al. and was proven in the classical random-oracle
model. Our main contribution is showing that the transformation also works
against quantum adversaries in the quantum random-oracle model. We develop
proof techniques such as adaptively programming a quantum random-oracle in a
new setting, which could be of independent interest. Applying the
transformation to an existential-unforgeable signature scheme due to Cash et
al., which can be shown to be quantum-secure assuming certain lattice problems
are hard for quantum computers, we get an efficient quantum-secure strongly
unforgeable signature scheme in the quantum random-oracle model.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in Proceedings TQC 201
Quantum Physics and Computers
Recent theoretical results confirm that quantum theory provides the
possibility of new ways of performing efficient calculations. The most striking
example is the factoring problem. It has recently been shown that computers
that exploit quantum features could factor large composite integers. This task
is believed to be out of reach of classical computers as soon as the number of
digits in the number to factor exceeds a certain limit. The additional power of
quantum computers comes from the possibility of employing a superposition of
states, of following many distinct computation paths and of producing a final
output that depends on the interference of all of them. This ``quantum
parallelism'' outstrips by far any parallelism that can be thought of in
classical computation and is responsible for the ``exponential'' speed-up of
computation.
This is a non-technical (or at least not too technical) introduction to the
field of quantum computation. It does not cover very recent topics, such as
error-correction.Comment: 27 pages, LaTeX, 8 PostScript figures embedded. A bug in one of the
postscript files has been fixed. Reprints available from the author. The
files are also available from
http://eve.physics.ox.ac.uk/Articles/QC.Articles.htm
Labeling Workflow Views with Fine-Grained Dependencies
This paper considers the problem of efficiently answering reachability
queries over views of provenance graphs, derived from executions of workflows
that may include recursion. Such views include composite modules and model
fine-grained dependencies between module inputs and outputs. A novel
view-adaptive dynamic labeling scheme is developed for efficient query
evaluation, in which view specifications are labeled statically (i.e. as they
are created) and data items are labeled dynamically as they are produced during
a workflow execution. Although the combination of fine-grained dependencies and
recursive workflows entail, in general, long (linear-size) data labels, we show
that for a large natural class of workflows and views, labels are compact
(logarithmic-size) and reachability queries can be evaluated in constant time.
Experimental results demonstrate the benefit of this approach over the
state-of-the-art technique when applied for labeling multiple views.Comment: VLDB201
A Touch of Evil: High-Assurance Cryptographic Hardware from Untrusted Components
The semiconductor industry is fully globalized and integrated circuits (ICs)
are commonly defined, designed and fabricated in different premises across the
world. This reduces production costs, but also exposes ICs to supply chain
attacks, where insiders introduce malicious circuitry into the final products.
Additionally, despite extensive post-fabrication testing, it is not uncommon
for ICs with subtle fabrication errors to make it into production systems.
While many systems may be able to tolerate a few byzantine components, this is
not the case for cryptographic hardware, storing and computing on confidential
data. For this reason, many error and backdoor detection techniques have been
proposed over the years. So far all attempts have been either quickly
circumvented, or come with unrealistically high manufacturing costs and
complexity.
This paper proposes Myst, a practical high-assurance architecture, that uses
commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, and provides strong security
guarantees, even in the presence of multiple malicious or faulty components.
The key idea is to combine protective-redundancy with modern threshold
cryptographic techniques to build a system tolerant to hardware trojans and
errors. To evaluate our design, we build a Hardware Security Module that
provides the highest level of assurance possible with COTS components.
Specifically, we employ more than a hundred COTS secure crypto-coprocessors,
verified to FIPS140-2 Level 4 tamper-resistance standards, and use them to
realize high-confidentiality random number generation, key derivation, public
key decryption and signing. Our experiments show a reasonable computational
overhead (less than 1% for both Decryption and Signing) and an exponential
increase in backdoor-tolerance as more ICs are added
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