5,256 research outputs found
Quantum Cryptography in Practice
BBN, Harvard, and Boston University are building the DARPA Quantum Network,
the world's first network that delivers end-to-end network security via
high-speed Quantum Key Distribution, and testing that Network against
sophisticated eavesdropping attacks. The first network link has been up and
steadily operational in our laboratory since December 2002. It provides a
Virtual Private Network between private enclaves, with user traffic protected
by a weak-coherent implementation of quantum cryptography. This prototype is
suitable for deployment in metro-size areas via standard telecom (dark) fiber.
In this paper, we introduce quantum cryptography, discuss its relation to
modern secure networks, and describe its unusual physical layer, its
specialized quantum cryptographic protocol suite (quite interesting in its own
right), and our extensions to IPsec to integrate it with quantum cryptography.Comment: Preprint of SIGCOMM 2003 pape
Quantifying pervasive authentication: the case of the Hancke-Kuhn protocol
As mobile devices pervade physical space, the familiar authentication
patterns are becoming insufficient: besides entity authentication, many
applications require, e.g., location authentication. Many interesting protocols
have been proposed and implemented to provide such strengthened forms of
authentication, but there are very few proofs that such protocols satisfy the
required security properties. The logical formalisms, devised for reasoning
about security protocols on standard computer networks, turn out to be
difficult to adapt for reasoning about hybrid protocols, used in pervasive and
heterogenous networks.
We refine the Dolev-Yao-style algebraic method for protocol analysis by a
probabilistic model of guessing, needed to analyze protocols that mix weak
cryptography with physical properties of nonstandard communication channels.
Applying this model, we provide a precise security proof for a proximity
authentication protocol, due to Hancke and Kuhn, that uses a subtle form of
probabilistic reasoning to achieve its goals.Comment: 31 pages, 2 figures; short version of this paper appeared in the
Proceedings of MFPS 201
Computational and Energy Costs of Cryptographic Algorithms on Handheld Devices
Networks are evolving toward a ubiquitous model in which heterogeneous
devices are interconnected. Cryptographic algorithms are required for developing security
solutions that protect network activity. However, the computational and energy limitations
of network devices jeopardize the actual implementation of such mechanisms. In this
paper, we perform a wide analysis on the expenses of launching symmetric and asymmetric
cryptographic algorithms, hash chain functions, elliptic curves cryptography and pairing
based cryptography on personal agendas, and compare them with the costs of basic operating
system functions. Results show that although cryptographic power costs are high and such
operations shall be restricted in time, they are not the main limiting factor of the autonomy
of a device
PPP-Completeness with Connections to Cryptography
Polynomial Pigeonhole Principle (PPP) is an important subclass of TFNP with
profound connections to the complexity of the fundamental cryptographic
primitives: collision-resistant hash functions and one-way permutations. In
contrast to most of the other subclasses of TFNP, no complete problem is known
for PPP. Our work identifies the first PPP-complete problem without any circuit
or Turing Machine given explicitly in the input, and thus we answer a
longstanding open question from [Papadimitriou1994]. Specifically, we show that
constrained-SIS (cSIS), a generalized version of the well-known Short Integer
Solution problem (SIS) from lattice-based cryptography, is PPP-complete.
In order to give intuition behind our reduction for constrained-SIS, we
identify another PPP-complete problem with a circuit in the input but closely
related to lattice problems. We call this problem BLICHFELDT and it is the
computational problem associated with Blichfeldt's fundamental theorem in the
theory of lattices.
Building on the inherent connection of PPP with collision-resistant hash
functions, we use our completeness result to construct the first natural hash
function family that captures the hardness of all collision-resistant hash
functions in a worst-case sense, i.e. it is natural and universal in the
worst-case. The close resemblance of our hash function family with SIS, leads
us to the first candidate collision-resistant hash function that is both
natural and universal in an average-case sense.
Finally, our results enrich our understanding of the connections between PPP,
lattice problems and other concrete cryptographic assumptions, such as the
discrete logarithm problem over general groups
Stopping time signatures for some algorithms in cryptography
We consider the normalized distribution of the overall running times of some
cryptographic algorithms, and what information they reveal about the
algorithms. Recent work of Deift, Menon, Olver, Pfrang, and Trogdon has shown
that certain numerical algorithms applied to large random matrices exhibit a
characteristic distribution of running times, which depends only on the
algorithm but are independent of the choice of probability distributions for
the matrices. Different algorithms often exhibit different running time
distributions, and so the histograms for these running time distributions
provide a time-signature for the algorithms, making it possible, in many cases,
to distinguish one algorithm from another. In this paper we extend this
analysis to cryptographic algorithms, and present examples of such algorithms
with time-signatures that are indistinguishable, and others with
time-signatures that are clearly distinct.Comment: 20 page
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