Optimally Tight Security Proofs for Hash-Then-Publish Time-Stamping

The security of cryptographic schemes is proven secure by reducing an attacker which breaks the scheme to an algorithm that could be used to solve the underlying hard assumption (e.g., Discrete Logarithm, Decisional Diffie–Hellman). The reduction is considered tight if it results in approximately similar probability bounds to that of solving the underlying hard assumption. Tight security is desirable as it improves security guarantees and allows the use of shorter parameters without the risk of compromising security. In this work, we propose an identity-based identification (IBI) scheme with tight security based on a variant of the Schnorr signature scheme known as TNC signatures. The proposed IBI scheme enjoys shorter parameters and key sizes as compared to existing IBI schemes without increasing the number of operations required for its identification protocol. Our scheme is suitable to be used for lightweight authentication in resource-constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) as it utilizes the lowest amount of bandwidth when compared to other state-of-the-art symmetric key lightweight authentication schemes. Although it is costlier than its symmetric key counterparts in terms of operational costs due to its asymmetric key nature, it enjoys other benefits such as decentralized authentication and scalable key management. As a proof of concept to substantiate our claims, we perform an implementation of our scheme to demonstrate its speed and memory usage when it runs on both high and low-end devices.

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Computing conditional entropies for quantum correlations

Nature Communications ◽

10.1038/s41467-020-20018-1 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Peter Brown ◽

Hamza Fawzi ◽

Omar Fawzi

Keyword(s):

Quantum Key Distribution ◽

Detection Efficiency ◽

Conditional Entropy ◽

Key Distribution ◽

Quantum Correlations ◽

Upper Bounds ◽

Cryptographic Protocols ◽

Quantum States ◽

Security Proofs

AbstractThe rates of quantum cryptographic protocols are usually expressed in terms of a conditional entropy minimized over a certain set of quantum states. In particular, in the device-independent setting, the minimization is over all the quantum states jointly held by the adversary and the parties that are consistent with the statistics that are seen by the parties. Here, we introduce a method to approximate such entropic quantities. Applied to the setting of device-independent randomness generation and quantum key distribution, we obtain improvements on protocol rates in various settings. In particular, we find new upper bounds on the minimal global detection efficiency required to perform device-independent quantum key distribution without additional preprocessing. Furthermore, we show that our construction can be readily combined with the entropy accumulation theorem in order to establish full finite-key security proofs for these protocols.

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