Shannon Perfect Secrecy in a Discrete Hilbert Space

The One-time-pad (OTP) was mathematically proven to be perfectly secure by Shannon in 1949. We propose to extend the classical OTP from an n-bit finite field to the entire symmetric group over the finite field. Within this context the symmetric group can be represented by a discrete Hilbert sphere (DHS) over an n-bit computational basis. Unlike the continuous Hilbert space defined over a complex field in quantum computing, a DHS is defined over the finite field GF(2). Within this DHS, the entire symmetric group can be completely described by the complete set of n-bit binary permutation matrices. Encoding of a plaintext can be done by randomly selecting a permutation matrix from the symmetric group to multiply with the computational basis vector associated with the state corresponding to the data to be encoded. Then, the resulting vector is converted to an output state as the ciphertext. The decoding is the same procedure but with the transpose of the pre-shared permutation matrix. We demonstrate that under this extension, the 1-to-1 mapping in the classical OTP is equally likely decoupled in Discrete Hilbert Space. The uncertainty relationship between permutation matrices protects the selected pad, consisting of M permutation matrices (also called Quantum permutation pad, or QPP). QPP not only maintains the perfect secrecy feature of the classical formulation but is also reusable without invalidating the perfect secrecy property. The extended Shannon perfect secrecy is then stated such that the ciphertext C gives absolutely no information about the plaintext P and the pad.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, presented and published by QCE202

Quantum Public Key Distribution using Randomized Glauber States

State-of-the-art Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is based on the uncertainty principle of qubits on quantum measurements and is theoretically proven to be unconditionally secure. Over the past three decades, QKD has been explored with single photons as the information carrier. More recently, attention has shifted towards using weak coherent laser pulses as the information carrier. In this paper, we propose a novel quantum key distribution mechanism over a pure optical channel using randomized Glauber states. The proposed mechanism closely resembles a quantum mechanical implementation of the public key envelope idea. For the proposed solution, we explore physical countermeasures to provide path authentication and to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks. Other attack vectors can also be effectively mitigated by leveraging the QPKE, the uncertainty principle and the DPSK modulation technique.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures; presented and published by QCE202

An empirical study on the risks of using off-the-shelf techniques for processing mailing list data

Mailing list repositories contain valuable information about the history of a project. Research is starting to mine this information to support developers and maintainers of long-lived software projects. However, such information exists as unstructured data that needs special processing before it can be studied. In this paper, we identify several challenges that arise when using off-the-shelf techniques for processing mailing list data. Our study highlights the importance of proper processing of mailing list data to ensure accurate research results. 1

Extracting structural information from bug reports

In software engineering experiments, the description of bug reports is typically treated as natural language text, although it often contains stack traces, source code, and patches. Neglecting such structural elements is a loss of valuable information; structure usually leads to a better performance of machine learning approaches. In this paper, we present a tool called infoZilla that detects structural elements from bug reports with near perfect accuracy and allows us to extract them. We anticipate that infoZilla can be used to leverage data from bug reports at a different granularity level that can facilitate interesting research in the future. Copyright 2008 ACM

Duplicate Bug Reports Considered Harmful... Really?

In a survey we found that most developers have experienced duplicated bug reports, however, only few considered them as a serious problem. This contradicts popular wisdom that considers bug duplicates as a serious problem for open source projects. In the survey, developers also pointed out that the additional information provided by duplicates helps to resolve bugs quicker. In this paper, we therefore propose to merge bug duplicates, rather than treating them separately. We quantify the amount of information that is added for developers and show that automatic triaging can be improved as well. In addition, we discuss the different reasons why users submit duplicate bug reports in the first place. 1