Key Exchange in the Quantum Era: Evaluating a Hybrid System of Public-Key Cryptography and Physical-Layer Security
Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/Report › Conference contribution › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
Today's information society relies on cryptography to achieve security goals such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation for digital communications. Here, public-key cryptosystems play a pivotal role to share encryption keys and create digital signatures. However, quantum computers threaten the security of traditional public-key cryptosystems as they can tame computational problems underlying the schemes, i.e., discrete logarithm and integer factorization. The prospective arrival of capable-enough quantum computers already threatens today's secret communication in terms of their long-term secrecy when stored to be later decrypted. Therefore, researchers strive to develop and deploy alternative schemes.In this work, we evaluate a key exchange protocol based on combining public-key schemes with physical-layer security, anticipating the prospect of quantum attacks: If a powerful quantum attacker cannot immediately obtain a private key, legitimate parties have a window of short-term secrecy to perform a physical-layer jamming key exchange (JKE) to establish a long-term shared secret. Thereby, the protocol constraints the computation time available to the attacker to break the employed public-key cryptography. In this paper, we outline the protocol, discuss its security, and point out challenges to be resolved.
Details
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | 2025 59th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems, CISS 2025 |
| Publisher | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| ISBN (electronic) | 979-8-3315-1326-9 |
| Publication status | Published - 2025 |
| Peer-reviewed | Yes |
Publication series
| Series | Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS) |
|---|---|
| ISSN | 2837-0163 |
Conference
| Title | 59th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems |
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| Abbreviated title | CISS 2025 |
| Conference number | 59 |
| Duration | 19 - 21 March 2025 |
| Website | |
| Location | Johns Hopkins University |
| City | Baltimore |
| Country | United States of America |