Keeping secrets in a quantum world

Sulakshana Sagar Malwade, Shilpa Choudhary, Santosh H. Lavate +3 more

As the world becomes more computerized, keeping data transfer safe has become very important. Quantum computers and other strong computers have the ability to break classical encryption methods, even though they are widely used. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a new way to protect data. It uses quantum physics to make sure that the sharing of cryptographic keys is safe. The aim of this study is to look into how QKD can be used to improve the security of data transfer. The suggested method combines QKD with current encryption standards to create a safe and effective way to send data. The method includes setting up a key sharing system based on QKD and then using symmetric encryption algorithms to keep the data being sent safe. The system is tried in different communication settings to see how well it protects against spying and "man-in-the-middle" attacks. The study's results show that QKD greatly improves the safety of sending data by keeping the cryptography keys secret. The results show that QKD has the potential to stop people from getting in without permission and find any attempts to change the keys while they are being sent out. The table below shows performance numbers that show how well QKD works in real-world situations. It shows how well communication speeds and security measures compare.

Juan Pablo Paz

Wei Xi, Xiang-Yang Li, Chen Qian +4 more

Device to device (D2D) communication is expected to become a promising technology of the next-generation wireless communication systems. Security issues have become technical barriers of D2D communication due to its “open-air” nature and lack of centralized control. Generating symmetric keys individually on different communication parties without key exchange or distribution is desirable but challenging. Recent work has proposed to extract keys from the measurement of physical layer random variations of a wireless channel, e.g., the channel state information (CSI) from orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). Existing CSI-based key extraction methods usually use the measurement results of individual subcarriers. However, our real world experiment results show that CSI measurements from near-by subcarriers have strong correlations and a generated key may have a large proportion of repeated bit segments. Hence attackers may crack the key in a relatively short time and hence reduce the security level of the generated keys. In this work, we propose a fast secret key extraction protocol, called KEEP. KEEP uses a validation-recombination mechanism to obtain consistent secret keys from CSI measurements of all subcarriers. It achieves high security level of the keys and fast key-generation rate. We implement KEEP using off-the-shelf 802.11n devices and evaluate its performance via extensive experiments. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that KEEP is safer and more effective than the state-of-the-art approaches.

Colin P. Williams, Scott H. Clearwater

Jacob Aron

Alan Turing and an army of codebreakers took years to crack the Enigma code during the second world war. Just be thankful the Nazis weren't using a quantum Enigma machine. Quantum key distribution can already keep secret the key to a code. Enigma machines are like souped-up typewriters, with an illuminated panel above the keyboard that also displays the alphabet. Type in a letter and a different letter on the panel lights up, indicating how to encrypt that character. Wired rotors do the scrambling by guiding an electrical signal along a certain path.