Network coding-based post-quantum cryptography

We propose a novel hybrid universal network-coding cryptosystem (HUNCC) to obtain secure post-quantum cryptography at high communication rates. The secure network-coding scheme we offer is hybrid in the sense that it combines information-theoretic security with public-key cryptography. In addition, the scheme is general and can be applied to any communication network, and to any public-key cryptosystem. Our hybrid scheme is based on the information theoretic notion of individual secrecy, which traditionally relies on the assumption that an eavesdropper can only observe a subset of the communication links between the trusted parties – an assumption that is often challenging to enforce. For this setting, several code constructions have been developed, where the messages are linearly mixed before transmission over each of the paths in a way that guarantees that an adversary which observes only a subset has sufficient uncertainty about each individual message. Instead, in this article, we take a computational viewpoint, and construct a coding scheme in which an arbitrary secure cryptosystem is utilized on a subset of the links, while a pre-processing similar to the one in individual security is utilized. Under this scheme, we demonstrate 1) a computational security guarantee for an adversary which observes the entirety of the links 2) an information theoretic security guarantee for an adversary which observes a subset of the links, and 3) information rates which approach the capacity of the network and greatly improve upon the current solutions. A perhaps surprising consequence of our scheme is that, to guarantee a computational security level b, it is sufficient to encrypt a single link using a computational post-quantum scheme. That is, using HUNCC, we can ensure post-quantum security in networks where it is not possible to use public-key encryption over all the links in the network. In addition, the information rate approaches 1 as the number of communication links increases. As a concrete example, in a multipath network with three links, using a 128-bit computationally secure McEliece cryptosystem only over one link, we obtain a 128-bit individually computationally secure level over all paths with a total information rate of 0.91 in the network. © 2021 IEEE.