Physical Cryptographic Techniques and Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Cryptographic algorithms and protocols form the backbone of cyber-infrastructure security and privacy in the modern world. Cryptography benefits from physically derived randomness. This benefit could be due to better key selection, the integration of physical randomness in a cryptographic protocol, or the building of entire encryption/decryption and PKI frameworks on top of physical randomness.

Physical randomness is a by-product of the silicon fabrication process. Most of the physical parameters such as metal or n-diff width, gate oxide thickness, and doping level in the transistor channels are statistically distributed. This gives a probability distribution to circuit-level observable parameters such as transistor delay. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are examples of circuits specifically designed to amplify the differences between two chips due to this distribution.

Such random values can also be extracted as a by-product of a computing unit such as the Arithmetic Logic Unit. There are variants of Diffie–Hellman key exchange that can be used for message exchange between two parties with physical randomness sources.  Other secret sharing schemes such as Shamir’s secret sharing can be adapted to utilize physical randomness.

Moreover, emerging applications such as edge computing need low-resource encryption/decryption and PKI schemes. Physical-randomness-enabled physical cryptography may be more suitable in such applications. Other areas with the potential to deploy physical randomness are blockchains and post-quantum cryptography (PQC).

This Special Issue solicits papers on all aspects of physical cryptography such as new encryption/decryption, PKI, hash schemas with physical randomness, edge data privacy and provenance enabled by physical randomness, and machine learning models with enhanced robustness due to physical randomness.

Prof. Dr. Akhilesh Tyagi
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• physical randomness
• physical cryptography
• physical crypto hash
• physical provenance
• physical unclonable functions