Privacy amplification with asymptotically optimal entropy loss

Abstract

We study the problem of “privacy amplification”: key agreement between two parties who both know a weak secret w , such as a password. (Such a setting is ubiquitous on the internet, where passwords are the most commonly used security device.) We assume that the key agreement protocol is taking place in the presence of an active computationally unbounded adversary Eve. The adversary may have partial knowledge about w , so we assume only that w has some entropy from Eve’s point of view. Thus, the goal of the protocol is to convert this nonuniform secret w into a uniformly distributed string R that is fully secret from Eve. R may then be used as a key for running symmetric cryptographic protocols (such as encryption, authentication, etc.).

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Sep 08, 2014
Source ID
10.1145/2630064

Entities

People

  • Bhavana Kanukurthi
  • Leonid Reyzin
  • Nishanth Chandran
  • Rafail Ostrovsky

Organizations

  • Boston University
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Division of Computer and Network Systems
  • Division of Computing and Communication Foundations
  • Division of Information and Intelligent Systems
  • International Business Machines Corporation (Armonk, NY)
  • Lockheed Martin
  • Microsoft
  • Office of Naval Research
  • Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications
  • University of California, Los Angeles
  • Xerox

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Mathematics

Readers

  • Cybersecurity.
  • Fluid Dynamics.
  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.