Enhanced usage of keys obtained by physical, unconditionally secure distributions

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hybrid physical and software-based key distribution protocol that enhances speed and maintains unconditional security, enabling practical unconditionally secure communication without reusing keys.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scheme combining physical and software-based keys to improve speed while preserving unconditional security, addressing limitations of existing physical key distribution methods.

Findings

Reduces physical key distribution speed limitations

Enables unconditionally secure software key sharing

Proposes a practical hybrid key distribution protocol

Abstract

Unconditionally secure physical key distribution schemes are very slow, and it is practically impossible to use a one-time-pad based cipher to guarantee unconditional security for the encryption of data because using the key bits more than once gives out statistical information, for example via the known-plain-text-attack or by utilizing known components of the protocol and language statistics. Here we outline a protocol that reduces this speed problem and allows almost-one-time-pad based communication with an unconditionally secure physical key of finite length. The physical, unconditionally secure key is not used for data encryption but is employed in order to generate and share a new software-based key without any known-plain-text component. The software-only-based key distribution is then changed from computationally secure to unconditionally secure, because the communicated key-exchange data (algorithm parameters, one-way functions of random numbers, etc.) are encrypted in an unconditionally secure way with a one-time-pad. For practical applications, this combined physical/software key distribution based communication looks favorable compared to the software-only and physical-only key distribution based communication whenever the speed of the physical key distribution is much lower than that of the software-based key distribution. A mathematical security proof of this new scheme remains an open problem.