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7th Annual IEEE Information Assurance Workshop 21-23 June 2006 "The West Point Workshop" United States Military Academy, West Point, New York |
| Chair: LTC Ronald Dodge, Ronald.Dodge@usma.edu | |
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Post-Quantum Private Key and Public Key Exchange ProtocolsXiangdong LiThe 7th IEEE Information Assurance Workshop (IAWorkshop 2006)West Point, New York, USA, June 21-23, 2006
AbstractThe first and most popular public key exchange algorithm is RSA. The security of RSA is based on the intractability of the integer factorization problem. Diffie-Hellman key exchange relies on difficulty of computing discrete logarithms. There are a few other key exchange schemes that are used in practice, for example, the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). The security of those schemes is based on the discrete logarithm problem in the multiplicative group of a prime field or in the group of points of an elliptic curve over a finite field.When quantum computers reach approximately 30 to 40 q-bits they will start to have the speed (parallelism) needed to attack the methods society uses to protect data and processes, including encryption, digital signatures, random number generators, key transmission, and other security algorithms. We cannot predict exactly when this will happen because each advance in the number of q-bits has had a radically different hardware architecture. We believe quantum computers will surpass the speed of “Moore’s Law” computers in the next 10 or 20 years, break encryption in 20 to 30 years, and break the responding enhanced encryption (with much longer key lengths) in 30 to 50 years. Most planners don’t look 20 years into the future, and propose to defend against quantum computer attacks by lengthening the keys. However, we can also defend against quantum computer attacks by researching a way which is somewhat or wholly immune to quantum computer attacks. We proposed the post-quantum private key and public key exchange protocols. Suppose we have a single data source as an orbital satellite outputting a random bit stream. Sender Alice and receiver Bob can get these bits as the keys, for example they make a public agreement of 1024-bit key size.
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