Quantum Safe Lightweight Cryptography with Quantum Permutation Pad

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Abstract

Quantum permutation pad or QPP was first proposed by Kuang and Bettenburg in 2020 [15]. QPP is a generic quantum algorithm consisting of multiple n-qubits quantum permutation gates. As a quantum algorithm, QPP can be implemented both in a quantum computing system as a quantum circuit operating on n-qubits' state for transformation and in a classical computing system represented by a pad of n-bit permutation matrices. QPP has two unique characteristics: huge Shannon information entropy and non-commutativity between permutation matrices or the generalized uncertainty principal. Permutation transformation is bijective mapping between input information space and output ciphertext space. That means, QPP has the property of Shannon perfect secrecy with reusability due to the uncertainty relationship. QPP is the generalization of One-Time-Pad or OTP over Hilbert space and OTP is the simplification of QPP over a Galois field. Based on those, this paper explores a variant of AES for a quantum safe lightweight cryptography by incorporating AES ShiftRows and MixColumns with QPP or called AES-QPP. AES-QPP unifies the SubBytes and AddRoundKey with the same QPP of 16 8-bit permutation matrices, essentially SubBytes to be a special 8-bit permutation matrix and AddRoundKey to be 16 8-bit permutation matrices selected from XOR operations. By randomly selecting 16 permutation matrices with a secret key material, AES-QPP could hold a total equivalent 26,944 bits of Shannon entropy. It not only improves the security against differential and linear attacks but also largely reduces the number of rounds to 5 rounds. AES-QPP could be a good candidate for quantum safe lightweight cryptography.