498 research outputs found
On the Key-Uncertainty of Quantum Ciphers and the Computational Security of One-way Quantum Transmission
We consider the scenario where Alice wants to send a secret (classical)
-bit message to Bob using a classical key, and where only one-way
transmission from Alice to Bob is possible. In this case, quantum communication
cannot help to obtain perfect secrecy with key length smaller then . We
study the question of whether there might still be fundamental differences
between the case where quantum as opposed to classical communication is used.
In this direction, we show that there exist ciphers with perfect security
producing quantum ciphertext where, even if an adversary knows the plaintext
and applies an optimal measurement on the ciphertext, his Shannon uncertainty
about the key used is almost maximal. This is in contrast to the classical case
where the adversary always learns bits of information on the key in a known
plaintext attack. We also show that there is a limit to how different the
classical and quantum cases can be: the most probable key, given matching
plain- and ciphertexts, has the same probability in both the quantum and the
classical cases. We suggest an application of our results in the case where
only a short secret key is available and the message is much longer.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures. This is a revised version of an earlier version
that appeared in the proc. of Eucrocrypt'04:LNCS3027, 200
A fast and light stream cipher for smartphones
We present a stream cipher based on a chaotic dynamical system. Using a
chaotic trajectory sampled under certain rules in order to avoid any attempt to
reconstruct the original one, we create a binary pseudo-random keystream that
can only be exactly reproduced by someone that has fully knowledge of the
communication system parameters formed by a transmitter and a receiver and
sharing the same initial conditions. The plaintext is XORed with the keystream
creating the ciphertext, the encrypted message. This keystream passes the NISTs
randomness test and has been implemented in a videoconference App for
smartphones, in order to show the fast and light nature of the proposed
encryption system
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