In this paper we discuss the ability of channel codes to enhance cryptographic secrecy. Toward that end, we present the secrecy metric of degrees of freedom in an attacker's knowledge of the cryptogram, which is similar to equivocation. Using this notion of secrecy, we show how a specific practical channel coding system can be used to hide information about the ciphertext, thus increasing the difficulty of cryptographic attacks. The system setup is the wiretap channel model where transmitted data traverse through independent packet erasure channels with public feedback for authenticated ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest). The code design relies on puncturing nonsystematic low-density parity-check codes with the intent of inflicting an eavesdropper with stopping sets in the decoder. Furthermore, the design amplifies errors when stopping sets occur such that a receiver must guess all the channel-erased bits correctly to avoid an expected error rate of one half in the ciphertext. We extend previous results on the coding scheme by giving design criteria that reduces the effectiveness of a maximum-likelihood attack to that of a message-passing attack. We further extend security analysis to models with multiple receivers and collaborative attackers. Cryptographic security is enhanced in all these cases by exploiting properties of the physical-layer. The enhancement is accurately presented as a function of the degrees of freedom in the eavesdropper's knowledge of the ciphertext, and is even shown to be present when eavesdroppers have better channel quality than legitimate receivers.
This paper summarizes basic properties of PPTs and shows that each PPT belongs to one of six different classes. Mapping an ordered sequence of PPTs into a corresponding sequence of these six classes makes it possible to use them in cryptography. We pose problems whose solution would facilitate such cryptographic application.
Cryptographic check values (digital signatures, MACs and H-MACs) are useful only if they are free of errors. For that reason all of errors in cryptographic check values should be corrected after the transmission over a noisy channel before their verification is performed. Soft Input Decryption is a method of combining SISO convolutional decoding and decrypting of cryptographic check values to improve the correction of errors in themselves. If Soft Input Decryption is successful, i.e. all wrong bit of a cryptographic check value are corrected, these bit are sent as feedback information to the c…
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 prov…
General cryptographic schemes are presented where keys can be one-time or ephemeral. Processes for key exchange are derived. Public key cryptographic schemes based on the new systems are easily established. Authentication and signature schemes are implemented. The schemes are an advance on group ring techniques and are easily implemented but highly secure. They may be integrated with error-correcting coding schemes so that encryption/coding and decryption/decoding may be done simultaneously.
In this paper we consider tandem error control coding and cryptography in the setting of the {\em wiretap channel} due to Wyner. In a typical communications system a cryptographic application is run at a layer above the physical layer and assumes the channel is error free. However, in any real application the channels for friendly users and passive eavesdroppers are not error free and Wyner's wiretap model addresses this scenario. Using this model, we show the security of a common cryptographic primitive, i.e. a keystream generator based on linear feedback shift registers (LFSR), can be streng…
Traditional cryptography assumes an eavesdropper receives an error-free copy of the transmitted ciphertext. Wyner's wiretap channel model recognizes that at the physical layer both the intended receiver and the passive eavesdropper inevitably receive an error-prone version of the transmitted message which must be corrected prior to decryption. This paper considers the implications of using both channel and cryptographic codes under the wiretap channel model in a way that enhances the \emph{information-theoretic} security for the friendly parties by keeping the information transfer to the eaves…
Under the emerging network coding paradigm, intermediate nodes in the network are allowed not only to store and forward packets but also to process and mix different data flows. We propose a low-complexity cryptographic scheme that exploits the inherent security provided by random linear network coding and offers the advantage of reduced overhead in comparison to traditional end-to-end encryption of the entire data. Confidentiality is achieved by protecting (or "locking") the source coefficients required to decode the encoded data, without preventing intermediate nodes from running their stand…
To encrypt sensitive information existing in a color DICOM images, a medical privacy protection scheme (called as MPPS) based on chaos and DNA coding was proposed by using two coupled chaotic systems to produce cryptographic primitives. Relying on some empirical analyses and experimental results, the designers of MPPS claimed that it can withstand a chosen-plaintext attack and some other classic attacking models. However, this statement is groundless. In this paper, we investigate the essential properties of MPPS and DNA coding, and we then propose an efficient chosen-plaintext attack to discl…
Coding Opportunistically (COPE) is a simple but very effective data coding mechanism in the wireless network. However, COPE leaves risks for attackers easily getting the private information saved in the packets, when they move through the network to their destination nodes. Hence in our work, a lightweight cryptographic approach, namely SCOPE, is proposed to consolidate COPE against the honest-but-curious and malicious attacks. Honest-but-curious attack serves adversaries who accurately obey the protocol but try to learn as much private information as possible for their curiosity. Additionally…
We present a new information-theoretic definition and associated results, based on list decoding in a source coding setting. We begin by presenting list-source codes, which naturally map a key length (entropy) to list size. We then show that such codes can be analyzed in the context of a novel information-theoretic metric, ε-symbol secrecy, that encompasses both the one-time pad and traditional rate-based asymptotic metrics, but, like most cryptographic constructs, can be applied in non-asymptotic settings. We derive fundamental bounds for ε-symbol secrecy and demonstrate how these bounds can …
Traditional network security protocols depend mainly on developing cryptographic schemes and on using biometric methods. These have led to several network security protocols that are unbreakable based on difficulty of solving untractable mathematical problems such as factoring large integers. In this paper, Security of Networks Employing Encoding and Decoding (SNEED) is developed to mitigate single and multiple link attacks. Network coding and shared capacity among the working paths are used to provide data protection and data integrity against network attackers and eavesdroppers. SNEED can be…
In this work, we focus on the classical optical channel having Poissonian statistical behavior and propose a novel secrecy coding-based physical layer protocol. Our protocol is different but complementary to both (computationally secure) quantum immune cryptographic protocols and (information theoretically secure) quantum cryptographic protocols. Specifically, our (information theoretical) secrecy coding protocol secures classical digital information bits at photonic level exploiting the random nature of the Poisson channel. It is known that secrecy coding techniques for the Poisson channel ba…
The wiretap channel is a setting where one aims to provide information-theoretic privacy of communicated data based solely on the assumption that the channel from sender to adversary is "noisier" than the channel from sender to receiver. It has been the subject of decades of work in the information and coding (I&C) community. This paper bridges the gap between this body of work and modern cryptography with contributions along two fronts, namely metrics (definitions) of security, and schemes. We explain that the metric currently in use is weak and insufficient to guarantee security of applicati…
Side channel attacks have emerged as a serious threat to the security of both networked and embedded systems -- in particular through the implementations of cryptographic operations. Side channels can be difficult to model formally, but with careful coding and program transformation techniques it may be possible to verify security in the presence of specific side-channel attacks. But what if a program intentionally makes a tradeoff between security and efficiency and leaks some information through a side channel? In this paper we study such tradeoffs using ideas from recent research on declass…
In this work we investigate the problem of simultaneous privacy and integrity protection in cryptographic circuits. We consider a white-box scenario with a powerful, yet limited attacker. A concise metric for the level of probing and fault security is introduced, which is directly related to the capabilities of a realistic attacker. In order to investigate the interrelation of probing and fault security we introduce a common mathematical framework based on the formalism of information and coding theory. The framework unifies the known linear masking schemes. We proof a central theorem about th…
Side-channel attacks are efficient attacks against cryptographic devices. They use only quantities observable from outside, such as the duration and the power consumption. Attacks against synchronous devices using electric observations are facilitated by the fact that all transitions occur simultaneously with some global clock signal. Asynchronous control remove this synchronization and therefore makes it more difficult for the attacker to insulate \emph{interesting intervals}. In addition the coding of data in an asynchronous circuit is inherently more difficult to attack. This article descri…
With the advent of quantum key distribution (QKD) systems, perfect (i.e. information-theoretic) security can now be achieved for distribution of a cryptographic key. QKD systems and similar protocols use classical error-correcting codes for both error correction (for the honest parties to correct errors) and privacy amplification (to make an eavesdropper fully ignorant). From a coding perspective, a good model that corresponds to such a setting is the wire tap channel introduced by Wyner in 1975. In this paper, we study fundamental limits and coding methods for wire tap channels. We provide an…
The NP-hard problem of decoding random linear codes is crucial to both coding theory and cryptography. In particular, this problem underpins the security of many code based post-quantum cryptographic schemes. The state-of-art algorithms for solving this problem are the information syndrome decoding algorithm and its advanced variants. In this work, we consider syndrome decoding in the multiple instances setting. Two strategies are applied for different scenarios. The first strategy is to solve all instances with the aid of the precomputation technique. We adjust the current framework and disti…
Among the problems to guarantee secrecy for in-transit information, the difficulties involved in renewing cryptographic keys in a secure way using couriers, the perfect secrecy encryption method known as One-Time-Pad (OTP) became almost obsolete. Pure quantum key distribution (QKD) ideally offers security for key distribution and could revive OTP. However, special networks that may need optical fibers, satellite, relay stations, expensive detection equipment compared with telecom technology and the slow protocol offer powerful obstacles for widespread use of QKD. Classical encryption methods f…
The Java libraries JCA and JSSE offer cryptographic APIs to facilitate secure coding. When developers misuse some of the APIs, their code becomes vulnerable to cyber-attacks. To eliminate such vulnerabilities, people built tools to detect security-API misuses via pattern matching. However, most tools do not (1) fix misuses or (2) allow users to extend tools' pattern sets. To overcome both limitations, we created Seader-an example-based approach to detect and repair security-API misuses. Given an exemplar <insecure, secure>code pair, Seader compares the snippets to infer any API-misuse template…
In the past, two main approaches for the purpose of authentication, including information-theoretic authentication codes and complexity-theoretic message authentication codes (MACs), were almost independently developed. In this paper, we propose a new cryptographic primitive, namely, artificial-noise-aided MACs (ANA-MACs), which can be considered as both computationally secure and information-theoretically secure. For ANA-MACs, we introduce artificial noise to interfere with the complexity-theoretic MACs and quantization is further employed to facilitate packet-based transmission. With a chann…
