Quantum key distribution (QKD) offers a very strong property called everlasting security, which says if authentication is unbroken during the execution of QKD, the generated key remains information-theoretically secure indefinitely. For this purpose, we propose the use of certain universal hashing based MACs for use in QKD, which are fast, very efficient with key material, and are shown to be highly secure. Universal hash functions are ubiquitous in computer science with many applications ranging from quantum key distribution and information security to data structures and parallel computing. In QKD, they are used at least for authentication, error correction, and privacy amplification. Using results from Cohen [Duke Math. J., 1954], we also construct some new families of $\varepsilon$-almost-$\Delta$-universal hash function families which have much better collision bounds than the well-known Polynomial Hash. Then we propose a general method for converting any such family to an $\varepsilon$-almost-strongly universal hash function family, which makes them useful in a wide range of applications, including authentication in QKD.
More Efficient Privacy Amplification With Less Random Seeds via Dual Universal Hash Function
