102,958 research outputs found
Practical cryptographic strategies in the post-quantum era
We review new frontiers in information security technologies in
communications and distributed storage technologies with the use of classical,
quantum, hybrid classical-quantum, and post-quantum cryptography. We analyze
the current state-of-the-art, critical characteristics, development trends, and
limitations of these techniques for application in enterprise information
protection systems. An approach concerning the selection of practical
encryption technologies for enterprises with branched communication networks is
introduced.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; review pape
Practical LDPC coded modulation schemes for the fading broadcast channel with confidential messages
The broadcast channel with confidential messages is a well studied scenario
from the theoretical standpoint, but there is still lack of practical schemes
able to achieve some fixed level of reliability and security over such a
channel. In this paper, we consider a quasi-static fading channel in which both
public and private messages must be sent from the transmitter to the receivers,
and we aim at designing suitable coding and modulation schemes to achieve such
a target. For this purpose, we adopt the error rate as a metric, by considering
that reliability (security) is achieved when a sufficiently low (high) error
rate is experienced at the receiving side. We show that some conditions exist
on the system feasibility, and that some outage probability must be tolerated
to cope with the fading nature of the channel. The proposed solution exploits
low-density parity-check codes with unequal error protection, which are able to
guarantee two different levels of protection against noise for the public and
the private information, in conjunction with different modulation schemes for
the public and the private message bits.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, to be presented at IEEE ICC'14 - Workshop on
Wireless Physical Layer Securit
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
Effective Privacy Amplification for Secure Classical Communications
We study the practical effectiveness of privacy amplification for classical
key-distribution schemes. We find that in contrast to quantum key distribution
schemes, the high fidelity of the raw key generated in classical systems allow
the users to always sift a secure shorter key if they have an upper bound on
the eavesdropper probability to correctly guess the exchanged key-bits. The
number of privacy amplification iterations needed to achieve information leak
of 10^-8 in existing classical communicators is 2 or 3 resulting in a
corresponding slowdown 4 to 8. We analyze the inherent tradeoff between the
number of iterations and the security of the raw key. This property which is
unique to classical key distribution systems render them highly useful for
practical, especially for noisy channels where sufficiently low quantum bit
error ratios are difficult to achieve.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure
Artificial-Noise-Aided Physical Layer Phase Challenge-Response Authentication for Practical OFDM Transmission
Recently, we have developed a PHYsical layer Phase Challenge-Response
Authentication Scheme (PHY-PCRAS) for independent multicarrier transmission. In
this paper, we make a further step by proposing a novel artificial-noise-aided
PHY-PCRAS (ANA-PHY-PCRAS) for practical orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing (OFDM) transmission, where the Tikhonov-distributed artificial
noise is introduced to interfere with the phase-modulated key for resisting
potential key-recovery attacks whenever a static channel between two legitimate
users is unfortunately encountered. Then, we address various practical issues
for ANA-PHY-PCRAS with OFDM transmission, including correlation among
subchannels, imperfect carrier and timing recoveries. Among them, we show that
the effect of sampling offset is very significant and a search procedure in the
frequency domain should be incorporated for verification. With practical OFDM
transmission, the number of uncorrelated subchannels is often not sufficient.
Hence, we employ a time-separated approach for allocating enough subchannels
and a modified ANA-PHY-PCRAS is proposed to alleviate the discontinuity of
channel phase at far-separated time slots. Finally, the key equivocation is
derived for the worst case scenario. We conclude that the enhanced security of
ANA-PHY-PCRAS comes from the uncertainty of both the wireless channel and
introduced artificial noise, compared to the traditional challenge-response
authentication scheme implemented at the upper layer.Comment: 33 pages, 13 figures, submitted for possible publicatio
Cross-layer optimization of unequal protected layered video over hierarchical modulation
Abstract-unequal protection mechanisms have been proposed at several layers in order to improve the reliability of multimedia contents, especially for video data. The paper aims at implementing a multi-layer unequal protection scheme, which is based on a Physical-Transport-Application cross-layer design. Hierarchical modulation, in the physical layer, has been demonstrated to increase the overall user capacity of a wireless communications. On the other hand, unequal erasure protection codes at the transport layer turned out to be an efficient method to protect video data generated by the application layer by exploiting their intrinsic properties. In this paper, the two techniques are jointly optimized in order to enable recovering lost data in case the protection is performed separately. We show that the cross-layer design proposed herein outperforms the performance of hierarchical modulation and unequal erasure codes taken independently
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