Using data compression and randomization to build an unconditionally secure short key cipher
This addresses the challenge of secure encryption with short keys for scenarios requiring unconditional security against computationally unbounded adversaries, representing a novel advancement rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of constructing an unconditionally secure cipher with a key shorter than the message length, proposing a method that uses data compression and randomization with entropically-secure encryption to achieve a key length independent of message entropy or length, determined solely by the required security level.
We consider the problem of constructing an unconditionally secure cipher for the case when the key length is less than the length of the encrypted message. (Unconditional security means that a computationally unbounded adversary cannot obtain information about the encrypted message without the key.) In this article, we propose data compression and randomization techniques combined with entropically-secure encryption. The resulting cipher can be used for encryption in such a way that the key length does not depend on the entropy or the length of the encrypted message; instead, it is determined by the required security level.