Deterministic quantum-public-key encryption: forward search attack and randomization

Nikolopoulos, Georgios M.; Ioannou, Lawrence M.

Deterministic quantum-public-key encryption: forward search attack and randomization

Authors

Description

In the classical setting, public-key encryption requires randomness in order to be secure against a forward search attack, whereby an adversary compares the encryption of a guess of the secret message with that of the actual secret message. We show that this is also true in the information-theoretic setting -- where the public keys are quantum systems -- by defining and giving an example of a forward search attack for any deterministic quantum-public-key bit-encryption scheme. However, unlike in the classical setting, we show that any such deterministic scheme can be used as a black box to build a randomized bit-encryption scheme that is no longer susceptible to this attack.
5 pages, 1 figure