ITR:Information Theoretic Secure Hyper-Encryption and Protocols

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The overall objective of this proposal is to study and implement provably information theoretic secure methods for encryption and derive applications to important security tasks such as message and user authentication and commitment protocols. The great interest in quantum cryptography demonstrates the need for absolutely secure encryption. The approach will use existing networks to transmit large streams of encrypted data. The proposed implementation can be widely deployed within the near future. Having a practical, provably secure against any attack, method for preserving secrecy of messages is of great importance for protection of personal privacy and commercial correspondence. In recent years a new paradigm for encryption, one that does not depend on as yet unproven computational intractability results, was proposed. The customary assumption that the would be code-breaker is computationally bounded,is replaced by an assumption that he is storage space bounded. The Sender and Receiver share a small private key and employ an unending intense stream of random bits readable by them and possibly by adversaries. The bandwidth and duration of the bit stream renders the permanent storage of a comparable number of bits by the adversary economically infeasible. Methods for generating and broadcasting or transmitting the bit stream, and the viability of the storage bound assumption, will be studied and implemented. In recent years, strong results concerning the information theoretic everlasting secrecy of a practical encryption algorithm (Hyper-Encryption) in the bounded storage model were proved. The project will comprise four interleaving lines of work. 1. System design: Satellite, web page, and fiber optics based systems for the distribution of the random bit streams will be specified and analyzed in consultation with experts in these technologies. 2. Protocols and applications: Innovation and development of Hyper-Encryption based protocols for e-commerce and network security. 3. Web page hopping based Hyper-Encryption: Detailed development of a complete Hyper-Encryption system employing random walk over pages of the World Wide Web as a pragmatic source of randomness and evaluation of its viability. 4. Theoretical foundations: Improving the Hyper-Encryption algorithm. Employing randomness extraction methods to enhance the safety of the WWW based system. Projected achievements: A usable detailed system for provably secure communications and protocols based on Hyper-Encryptions. Complete theoretical foundation for Hyper-Encryption and its applications.