Paper 2024/1145

A Practical and Scalable Implementation of the Vernam Cipher, under Shannon Conditions, using Quantum Noise

Adrian Neal
Abstract

The one-time pad cipher is renowned for its theoretical perfect security, yet its practical deployment is primarily hindered by the key-size and distribution challenge. This paper introduces a novel approach to key distribution called q-stream, designed to make symmetric-key cryptography, and the one-time pad cipher in particular, a viable option for contemporary secure communications, and specifically, post-quantum cryptography, leveraging quantum noise and combinatorics to ensure secure and efficient key-distribution between communicating parties. We demonstrate that our key-distribution mechanism has a variable, yet quantifiable hardness of at least 504 bits, established from immutable mathematical laws, rather than conjectured-intractability, and how we overcome the one-time pad key-size issue with a localised quantum-noise seeded key-generation function, having a system hardness of at least 2304 bits, while introducing sender authentication and message integrity. Whilst the proposed solution has potential applications in fields requiring very high levels of security, such as military communications and large financial transactions, we show from our research with a prototype of q-stream, that it is sufficiently practical and scaleable for use in common browser-based web-applications, without any modification to the browser (i.e. plug-ins), running above SSL/TLS at the application level, where in tests, it achieved a key-distribution rate of around 7 million keys over a 5 minute surge-window, in a single (multi-threaded) instance of q-stream.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
one time padsymmetric key distributionquantum noisecombinatoricsforward secrecy
Contact author(s)
adrian neal @ oxfordscientifica com
History
2024-07-15: approved
2024-07-14: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2024/1145
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/1145,
      author = {Adrian Neal},
      title = {A Practical and Scalable Implementation of the Vernam Cipher, under Shannon Conditions, using Quantum Noise},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2024/1145},
      year = {2024},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1145}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.