Path Hopping: An MTD Strategy for Long-Term Quantum-Safe Communication

Abstract EN

Moving target defense (MTD) strategies have been widely studied for securing computer systems.

We consider using MTD strategies to provide long-term cryptographic security for message transmission against an eavesdropping adversary who has access to a quantum computer.

In such a setting, today’s widely used cryptographic systems including Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol and RSA cryptosystem will be insecure and alternative solutions are needed.

We will use a physical assumption, existence of multiple communication paths between the sender and the receiver, as the basis of security, and propose a cryptographic system that uses this assumption and an MTD strategy to guarantee efficient long-term information theoretic security even when only a single path is not eavesdropped.

Following the approach of Maleki et al., we model the system using a Markov chain, derive its transition probabilities, propose two security measures, and prove results that show how to calculate these measures using transition probabilities.

We define two types of attackers that we call risk-taking and risk-averse and compute our proposed measures for the two types of adversaries for a concrete MTD strategy.

We will use numerical analysis to study tradeoffs between system parameters, discuss our results, and propose directions for future research.