4,037 research outputs found
Error Free Perfect Secrecy Systems
Shannon's fundamental bound for perfect secrecy says that the entropy of the
secret message cannot be larger than the entropy of the secret key initially
shared by the sender and the legitimate receiver. Massey gave an information
theoretic proof of this result, however this proof does not require
independence of the key and ciphertext. By further assuming independence, we
obtain a tighter lower bound, namely that the key entropy is not less than the
logarithm of the message sample size in any cipher achieving perfect secrecy,
even if the source distribution is fixed. The same bound also applies to the
entropy of the ciphertext. The bounds still hold if the secret message has been
compressed before encryption.
This paper also illustrates that the lower bound only gives the minimum size
of the pre-shared secret key. When a cipher system is used multiple times, this
is no longer a reasonable measure for the portion of key consumed in each
round. Instead, this paper proposes and justifies a new measure for key
consumption rate. The existence of a fundamental tradeoff between the expected
key consumption and the number of channel uses for conveying a ciphertext is
shown. Optimal and nearly optimal secure codes are designed.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Trans. Info. Theor
Coding Schemes for Achieving Strong Secrecy at Negligible Cost
We study the problem of achieving strong secrecy over wiretap channels at
negligible cost, in the sense of maintaining the overall communication rate of
the same channel without secrecy constraints. Specifically, we propose and
analyze two source-channel coding architectures, in which secrecy is achieved
by multiplexing public and confidential messages. In both cases, our main
contribution is to show that secrecy can be achieved without compromising
communication rate and by requiring only randomness of asymptotically vanishing
rate. Our first source-channel coding architecture relies on a modified wiretap
channel code, in which randomization is performed using the output of a source
code. In contrast, our second architecture relies on a standard wiretap code
combined with a modified source code termed uniform compression code, in which
a small shared secret seed is used to enhance the uniformity of the source code
output. We carry out a detailed analysis of uniform compression codes and
characterize the optimal size of the shared seed.Comment: 15 pages, two-column, 5 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on
Information Theor
Experimental quantum key distribution with finite-key security analysis for noisy channels
In quantum key distribution implementations, each session is typically chosen
long enough so that the secret key rate approaches its asymptotic limit.
However, this choice may be constrained by the physical scenario, as in the
perspective use with satellites, where the passage of one terminal over the
other is restricted to a few minutes. Here we demonstrate experimentally the
extraction of secure keys leveraging an optimal design of the
prepare-and-measure scheme, according to recent finite-key theoretical
tight-bounds. The experiment is performed in different channel conditions, and
assuming two distinct attack models: individual attacks, or general quantum
attacks. The request on the number of exchanged qubits is then obtained as a
function of the key size and of the ambient quantum bit error rate. The results
indicate that viable conditions for effective symmetric, and even one-time-pad,
cryptography are achievable.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure
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