19,751 research outputs found
Cloud Computing in the Quantum Era
Cloud computing has become the prominent technology of this era. Its elasticity, dynamicity, availability, heterogeneity, and pay as you go pricing model has attracted several companies to migrate their businesses' services into the cloud. This gives them more time to focus solely on their businesses and reduces the management and backup overhead leveraging the flexibility of cloud computing. On the other hand, quantum technology is developing very rapidly. Experts are expecting to get an efficient quantum computer within the next decade. This has a significant impact on several sciences including cryptography, medical research, and other fields. This paper analyses the reciprocal impact of quantum technology on cloud computing and vice versa
Using quantum key distribution for cryptographic purposes: a survey
The appealing feature of quantum key distribution (QKD), from a cryptographic
viewpoint, is the ability to prove the information-theoretic security (ITS) of
the established keys. As a key establishment primitive, QKD however does not
provide a standalone security service in its own: the secret keys established
by QKD are in general then used by a subsequent cryptographic applications for
which the requirements, the context of use and the security properties can
vary. It is therefore important, in the perspective of integrating QKD in
security infrastructures, to analyze how QKD can be combined with other
cryptographic primitives. The purpose of this survey article, which is mostly
centered on European research results, is to contribute to such an analysis. We
first review and compare the properties of the existing key establishment
techniques, QKD being one of them. We then study more specifically two generic
scenarios related to the practical use of QKD in cryptographic infrastructures:
1) using QKD as a key renewal technique for a symmetric cipher over a
point-to-point link; 2) using QKD in a network containing many users with the
objective of offering any-to-any key establishment service. We discuss the
constraints as well as the potential interest of using QKD in these contexts.
We finally give an overview of challenges relative to the development of QKD
technology that also constitute potential avenues for cryptographic research.Comment: Revised version of the SECOQC White Paper. Published in the special
issue on QKD of TCS, Theoretical Computer Science (2014), pp. 62-8
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
The Crypto-democracy and the Trustworthy
In the current architecture of the Internet, there is a strong asymmetry in
terms of power between the entities that gather and process personal data
(e.g., major Internet companies, telecom operators, cloud providers, ...) and
the individuals from which this personal data is issued. In particular,
individuals have no choice but to blindly trust that these entities will
respect their privacy and protect their personal data. In this position paper,
we address this issue by proposing an utopian crypto-democracy model based on
existing scientific achievements from the field of cryptography. More
precisely, our main objective is to show that cryptographic primitives,
including in particular secure multiparty computation, offer a practical
solution to protect privacy while minimizing the trust assumptions. In the
crypto-democracy envisioned, individuals do not have to trust a single physical
entity with their personal data but rather their data is distributed among
several institutions. Together these institutions form a virtual entity called
the Trustworthy that is responsible for the storage of this data but which can
also compute on it (provided first that all the institutions agree on this).
Finally, we also propose a realistic proof-of-concept of the Trustworthy, in
which the roles of institutions are played by universities. This
proof-of-concept would have an important impact in demonstrating the
possibilities offered by the crypto-democracy paradigm.Comment: DPM 201
Finite-Block-Length Analysis in Classical and Quantum Information Theory
Coding technology is used in several information processing tasks. In
particular, when noise during transmission disturbs communications, coding
technology is employed to protect the information. However, there are two types
of coding technology: coding in classical information theory and coding in
quantum information theory. Although the physical media used to transmit
information ultimately obey quantum mechanics, we need to choose the type of
coding depending on the kind of information device, classical or quantum, that
is being used. In both branches of information theory, there are many elegant
theoretical results under the ideal assumption that an infinitely large system
is available. In a realistic situation, we need to account for finite size
effects. The present paper reviews finite size effects in classical and quantum
information theory with respect to various topics, including applied aspects
Fast Quantum Algorithm for Solving Multivariate Quadratic Equations
In August 2015 the cryptographic world was shaken by a sudden and surprising
announcement by the US National Security Agency NSA concerning plans to
transition to post-quantum algorithms. Since this announcement post-quantum
cryptography has become a topic of primary interest for several standardization
bodies. The transition from the currently deployed public-key algorithms to
post-quantum algorithms has been found to be challenging in many aspects. In
particular the problem of evaluating the quantum-bit security of such
post-quantum cryptosystems remains vastly open. Of course this question is of
primarily concern in the process of standardizing the post-quantum
cryptosystems. In this paper we consider the quantum security of the problem of
solving a system of {\it Boolean multivariate quadratic equations in
variables} (\MQb); a central problem in post-quantum cryptography. When ,
under a natural algebraic assumption, we present a Las-Vegas quantum algorithm
solving \MQb{} that requires the evaluation of, on average,
quantum gates. To our knowledge this is the fastest algorithm for solving
\MQb{}
Solving the Shortest Vector Problem in Lattices Faster Using Quantum Search
By applying Grover's quantum search algorithm to the lattice algorithms of
Micciancio and Voulgaris, Nguyen and Vidick, Wang et al., and Pujol and
Stehl\'{e}, we obtain improved asymptotic quantum results for solving the
shortest vector problem. With quantum computers we can provably find a shortest
vector in time , improving upon the classical time
complexity of of Pujol and Stehl\'{e} and the of Micciancio and Voulgaris, while heuristically we expect to find a
shortest vector in time , improving upon the classical time
complexity of of Wang et al. These quantum complexities
will be an important guide for the selection of parameters for post-quantum
cryptosystems based on the hardness of the shortest vector problem.Comment: 19 page
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