Biblio

Modern computing devices use classical algorithms such as Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA) and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) for their security. The securities of these algorithms relied on the problem and difficulty of integer factorization and also calculating the Discrete Logarithm Problems. With the introduction of quantum computers, recent research is focusing on developing alternative algorithms which are supposed to withstand attacks from quantum computers. One of such alternatives is the Hash-based Digital Signature Schemes. Chosen hash-based signature schemes over classical algorithms is because their security is on the hash function used and that they are metaheuristic in nature. This research work presents basic analysis and the background understanding of Stateful Hash-based Signature Schemes, particularly the Lamport One-Time Signature Scheme, Winternitz One-Time Signature Scheme, and the Merkle Signature Scheme. The three schemes selected are stateful, hence has common features and are few-time hash-based signature schemes. The selected Stateful Hash-based Digital Signature Schemes were analyzed based on their respective key generation, signature generation, signature verification, and their security levels. Practical working examples were given for better understanding. With the analyses, Merkle Signature Scheme proves to be the best candidate to be used in the Bitcoin Proof of Work protocol because of its security and its advantage of signing many messages.

The ubiquitous internetworking of devices in all areas of life is boosted by various trends for instance the Internet of Things. Promising technologies that can be used for such future environments come from Wireless Sensor Networks. It ensures connectivity between distributed, tiny and simple sensor nodes as well as sensor nodes and base stations in order to monitor physical or environmental conditions such as vibrations, temperature or motion. Security plays an increasingly important role in the coming decades in which attacking strategies are becoming more and more sophisticated. Contemporary cryptographic mechanisms face a great threat from quantum computers in the near future and together with Intrusion Detection Systems are hardly applicable on sensors due to strict resource constraints. Thus, in this work a future-proof lightweight and resource-aware security concept for sensor networks with a processing stage permeated filtering mechanism is proposed. A special focus in the concepts evaluation lies on the novel Magic Number filter to mitigate a special kind of Denial-of-Service attack performed on CC1350 LaunchPad ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller boards.

Due to the importance of securing electronic transactions, many cryptographic protocols have been employed, that mainly depend on distributed keys between the intended parties. In classical computers, the security of these protocols depends on the mathematical complexity of the encoding functions and on the length of the key. However, the existing classical algorithms 100% breakable with enough computational power, which can be provided by quantum machines. Moving to quantum computation, the field of security shifts into a new area of cryptographic solutions which is now the field of quantum cryptography. The era of quantum computers is at its beginning. There are few practical implementations and evaluations of quantum protocols. Therefore, the paper defines a well-known quantum key distribution protocol which is BB84 then provides a practical implementation of it on IBM QX software. The practical implementations showed that there were differences between BB84 theoretical expected results and the practical implementation results. Due to this, the paper provides a statistical analysis of the experiments by comparing the standard deviation of the results. Using the BB84 protocol the existence of a third-party eavesdropper can be detected. Thus, calculations of the probability of detecting/not detecting a third-party eavesdropping have been provided. These values are again compared to the theoretical expectation. The calculations showed that with the greater number of qubits, the percentage of detecting eavesdropper will be higher.

Today's rapid progress in the physical implementation of quantum computers demands scalable synthesis methods to map practical logic designs to quantum architectures. There exist many quantum algorithms which use classical functions with superposition of states. Motivated by recent trends, in this paper, we show the design of quantum circuit to perform modular exponentiation functions using two different approaches. In the design phase, first we generate quantum circuit from a verilog implementation of exponentiation functions using synthesis tools and then apply two different Quantum Error Correction techniques. Finally the circuit is further optimized using the Linear Nearest Neighbor (LNN) Property. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by generating a set of networks for the reversible modular exponentiation function for a set of input values. At the end of the work, we have summarized the obtained results, where a cost analysis over our developed approaches has been made. Experimental results show that depending on the choice of different QECC methods the performance figures can vary by up to 11%, 10%, 8% in T-count, number of qubits, number of gates respectively.

The Internet of things (IoT) has experienced rapid development these years, while its security and privacy remains a major challenge. One of the main security goals for the IoT is to build secure and authenticated channels between IoT nodes. A common way widely used to achieve this goal is using authenticated key exchange protocol. However, with the increasing progress of quantum computation, most authenticated key exchange protocols nowadays are threatened by the rise of quantum computers. In this study, we address this problem by using ring-SIS based KEM and hash function to construct an authenticated key exchange scheme so that we base the scheme on lattice based hard problems believed to be secure even with quantum attacks. We also prove the security of universal composability of our scheme. The scheme hence can keep security while runs in complicated environment.

In the computer based solutions of the problems in today's world; if the problem has a high complexity value, different requirements can be addressed such as necessity of simultaneous operation of many computers, the long processing times for the operation of algorithms, and computers with hardware features that can provide high performance. For this reason, it is inevitable to use a computer based on quantum physics in the near future in order to make today's cryptosystems unsafe, search the servers and other information storage centers on internet very quickly, solve optimization problems in the NP-hard category with a very wide solution space and analyze information on large-scale data processing and to process high-resolution image for artificial intelligence applications. In this study, an examination of quantum approaches and quantum computers, which will be widely used in the near future, was carried out and the areas in which such innovation can be used was evaluated. Malicious or non-malicious use of quantum computers with this capacity, the advantages and disadvantages of the high performance which it provides were examined under the head of security, the effect of this recent technology on the existing security systems was investigated.

In Wyner wiretap II model of communication, Alice and Bob are connected by a channel that can be eavesdropped by an adversary with unlimited computation who can select a fraction of communication to view, and the goal is to provide perfect information theoretic security. Information theoretic security is increasingly important because of the threat of quantum computers that can effectively break algorithms and protocols that are used in today's public key infrastructure. We consider interactive protocols for wiretap II channel with active adversary who can eavesdrop and add adversarial noise to the eavesdropped part of the codeword. These channels capture wireless setting where malicious eavesdroppers at reception distance of the transmitter can eavesdrop the communication and introduce jamming signal to the channel. We derive a new upperbound R ≤ 1 - ρ for the rate of interactive protocols over two-way wiretap II channel with active adversaries, and construct a perfectly secure protocol family with achievable rate 1 - 2ρ + ρ2. This is strictly higher than the rate of the best one round protocol which is 1 - 2ρ, hence showing that interaction improves rate. We also prove that even with interaction, reliable communication is possible only if ρ \textbackslashtextless; 1/2. An interesting aspect of this work is that our bounds will also hold in network setting when two nodes are connected by n paths, a ρ of which is corrupted by the adversary. We discuss our results, give their relations to the other works, and propose directions for future work.