PERSEUS Technology: New Trends in Information and Communication Security

Abstract

Using cryptography to protect information and communication has bacically two major drawbacks. First, the specific entropy profile of encrypted data makes their detection very easy. Second, the use of cryptography can be more or less regulated, not to say forbidden, according to the countries. If the right to freely protect our personal and private data is a fundamental right, it must not hinder the action of Nation States with respect to National security. Allowing encryption to citizens holds for bad guys as well. In this paper we propose a new approach in information and communication security that may solve all these issues, thus representing a rather interesting trade-off between apparently opposite security needs. We introduce the concept of scalable security based on computationnally hard problem of coding theory with the PERSEUS technology. The core idea is to encode date with variable punctured convolutional codes in such a way that any cryptanalytic attempt will require a time-consuming encoder reconstruction in order to decode. By adding noise in a suitable way, that reconstruction becomes untractable in practice except for Intelligence services that however must use supercomputers during a significant, scalable amount of time. Hence it limits naturally any will to unduly performs such attacks (eg. against citizens' privacy). On the users' side, encoder and noise parameters are first exchanged through an initial, short HTTPS session. The principles behind that approach have been mathematically validated in 1997 and 2007. We present the PERSEUS library we have developed under the triple GPL/LGPL/MPL licences. This library can be used to protect any kind of data.