| Traditional modern cryptography relies on unproven complexity assumptions that certain problems, such as integer factorization, are computationally hard, and the adversary is bounded in computing power. However, advances in algorithms and computing technology may render current cryptosystems insecure, and lead to the decryption of past secret messages. On the other hand, Shannon's pessimistic negative result essentially implies that if the adversary is all-powerful and has complete access to the communication line, then efficient practical solutions for information-theoretic security do not exist.; This thesis is a study of cryptography in the bounded storage model, where provable everlasting security can be achieved efficiently without any complexity assumption. It first presents an efficient scheme for encryption and authentication that is provably secure against strong adaptive attacks, by an adversary who is computationally unbounded and only storage-bounded. A major new result is that the shared secret key employed by the sender and the receiver can be re-used to send an exponential number of messages. Our encryption scheme further enjoys the surprising property that even if the secret key is captured by the adversary after the transmission of the ciphertext, the secrecy of the message is assured. The above is joint work with Michael Rabin.; Oblivious transfer is a cryptographic protocol that can serve as a basic primitive for all of cryptography. This thesis presents an implementation of oblivious transfer in the bounded storage model, which is again provably secure without complexity assumption. |
