Perfect Secrecy and Quantum-Secure Cryptography on Silicon; A Challenge to Quantum Key Distribution or Merely a Bridge to?
Perfect secrecy cryptography via mixing of chaotic waves in irreversible time-varying silicon chips
Abstract
Protecting confidential data is a major worldwide challenge. Classical cryptography is fast and scalable, but is broken by quantum algorithms. Quantum cryptography is unclonable, but requires quantum installations that are more expensive, slower, and less scalable than classical optical networks. Here we show a perfect secrecy cryptography in classical optical channels. The system exploits correlated chaotic wavepackets, which are mixed in inexpensive and CMOS compatible silicon chips. The chips can generate 0.1 Tbit of different keys for every mm of length of the input channel, and require the transmission of an amount of data that can be as small as 1/1000 of the message’s length. We discuss the security of this protocol for an attacker with unlimited technological power, and who can access the system copying any of its part, including the chips. The second law of thermodynamics and the exponential sensitivity of chaos unconditionally protect this scheme against any possible attack.
Introduction
With an information society that transfers an increasingly large amount of personal data over public channels, information security is an emerging worldwide challenge. Conventional cryptographic schemes based on data encryption standard (DES), advanced encryption standard (AES), and Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman (RSA) encode messages with public and private keys of short length. The main advantage of these algorithms is speed, and the main disadvantage is their security, which relies on computational and provable security arguments and not on unconditional proofs. A major threat lies in the development of quantum computers, which are predicted to crack any of these ciphers in a short period of time. A perfect secrecy cryptography, known as a one-time pad (OTP) was invented at the time of the telegraph and then patented by Vernam. The Vernam cipher encodes the message via a bitwise XOR operation with a random key that is as long as the text to be transmitted, never reused in whole or in part, and kept secret. Shannon demonstrated that this scheme, properly implemented, is unbreakable and does not offer any information to an attacker, except the maximum length of the message. Almost a century later, despite its proven absolute security, the OTP is still not adopted for lack of a practical and secure way for users to exchange the key.Since the 1980s, research efforts have been dedicated towards solving this problem with point-to-point quantum key distribution (QKD) algorithms, which leverage on the unclonability of single photons. While the progress of QKD in the past decades has been enormous, there are still critical challenges derived by the limits of quantum communications. Due to the impossibility of amplifying single photons, quantum networks are currently unable to scale up globally; their data transfer is considerably slower than classical optical communications, which already count with hundreds of high-bandwidth intercontinental lines, communication speed close to the light limit, and massive investments for the next years. Here we develop a physical realization of the OTP that is compatible with the existing optical communication infrastructure and offers unconditional security in the key distribution.
Discussion
We have demonstrated a protocol for a perfect secrecy cryptography that uses CMOS-compatible fingerprint silicon chips, which transmit information on a public classical optical network. The system’s security is evaluated following the Kerckhoff principle. The second law of thermodynamics and the exponential sensitivity of chaos prevents the attacker from getting any information on the key being exchanged by the users. The protocol proposed is fully compatible with the techniques of privacy amplification and information reconciliation already developed for QKD. Beyond the initial communication required for authenticating the users, the system does not require electronic databases, private keys, or confidential communications. Combined with the technological maturity, speed, and scalability of classic optical communications, the results show a open pathway towards implementing perfect secrecy cryptography at the global scale with contained costs.
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