Research on electronic travel document protocols using lattice-based cryptography
Chinmay Shah · Minds at UW (University of Wisconsin) · 2015
Statement of the ProblemThe world has become one globalized platform with the advent of sophisticated embedded systems as it allows people to communicate in the local town to the farthest town on this earth.This includes communicating via mobile phones, Internet or sending an instruction to microwave oven, television and other wireless systems.We make assumptions that our communication remains confidential when we communicate using mobile phones or Internet.We assume that the payment gateway will be authenticated and our banking details will remain confidential, while accessing Internet banking.We assume that our instruction sent to the wireless embedded systems will be received exactly as we had sent (Integrity) i.e. the message sent by us and the message received by the embedded system will be the same.We make these assumptions as there will be certain protocols followed to maintain security standards.The security of these protocols is generally based on certain computationally 'hard' problems such as factoring a very large number.These are computationally hard problems to solve due to limited computational resources.If a quantum computer will be built, then these problems will no longer remain computationally hard.They will be solved in polynomial time complexity.Hence, our messages will remain neither confidential nor have integrity.Network communication will, no longer be able to authenticate.Similarly, electronic travel documents will not remain secured.Today, travel documents are an integral part of the daily routine.Among these travel documents, passports allow the holder's identity to be verified.This protects the nations against illegitimate immigrants, criminals and terrorists.Similar to the above mentioned scenario, advent of quantum computers will allow forfeiting of passports.It will also allow access to personal information.Hence, posing risk to millions of lives. Methods and ProceduresTo conquer these issues, we propose to conduct research on replacing the current travel document protocols by using Lattice-based cryptography.This could be replicated in all other network based embedded systems.We are motivated to use Latticebased cryptography as it is one of the important classes of the post-quantum cryptography algorithms.Lattice based algorithms are important due to significant research by scientific community, well-known underlying lattice problems and computational efficiency.