Abstract
Security is an increasingly growing concern for network communications and video is an emerging segment of network traffic that uses large amounts of bandwidth. Streaming video, vs. downloading a video for later viewing, requires a continuous, high data rate. The data rate will vary depending on the quality of the video. Video surveillance is a streaming video application that in addition may require securing the data stream to prevent others from viewing it as well as prevent any tampering of that video stream. There are two parts to secure communication, key distribution and ciphers. A cipher requires a secret key that is used to encrypt data (plaintext), transforming it into an unreadable form (ciphertext) and then to decrypt it back into its original form. Key distribution is the method used to exchange the secret key between the desired end users and no one else. Current block ciphers are relatively slow compared to existing bandwidth because they require a substantial amount of processing that must compete for CPU cycles with the video encoding and compression processing. Frequently changing keys is thought to increase security, but the public key exchange method requires even more processing than the cipher. Cipher and key exchange processing can be off-loaded from the CPU, when the communication end point is the other end of the link, by using dedicated hardware called a link encryptor. Current classical security algorithms are based on the perceived computational complexity of certain mathematical functions and have not been proved secure. The public key algorithm is at risk from future quantum computers, whereas block ciphers are only weakened and an easy fix is to double the length of the key. Both are constantly at risk from a potential break through algorithm. Communications channels that exploit properties unique to quantum systems have been shown to enable functionality that cannot be achieved by classical means. If a high level of security is deemed necessary for the video stream, one might consider the use of a One-Time-Pad cipher [Wikipedia 2010], the only provably secure cipher, along with Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), also a provably secure method of exchanging the secret keys used by a cipher. QKD is a protocol based on the quantum laws of physics and is provably information theoretically secure to accomplish key distribution [Gisin, et al., 2002]. QKD keys, when used with a One-Time-Pad cipher, can provide secure communications. A One-Time-Pad cipher algorithm performs an Exclusive OR (XOR) on a random secret key and the message. This is a simple operation that incurs little overhead compared to the more common
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