Perfectly Secure Shannon Cipher Construction Based on the Matrix Power Function

Abstract

A Shannon cipher can be used as a building block for the block cipher construction if it is considered as one data block cipher. It has been proved that a Shannon cipher based on a matrix power function (MPF) is perfectly secure. This property was obtained by the special selection of algebraic structures to define the MPF. In an earlier paper we demonstrated, that certain MPF can be treated as a conjectured one-way function. This property is important since finding the inverse of a one-way function is related to an N P -complete problem. The obtained results of perfect security on a theoretical level coincide with the N P -completeness notion due to the well known Yao theorem. The proposed cipher does not need multiple rounds for the encryption of one data block and hence can be effectively parallelized since operations with matrices allow this effective parallelization.

Keywords

• Shannon cipher
• symmetric encryption
• perfect security
• block cipher