Abstract
We investigate whether the heart rate can be treated as a semi-random source with the aim of amplification by quantum devices. We use a semi-random source model called -Santha–Vazirani source, which can be amplified via quantum protocols to obtain a fully private random sequence. We analyze time intervals between consecutive heartbeats obtained from Holter electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings of people of different sex and age. We propose several transformations of the original time series into binary sequences. We have performed different statistical randomness tests and estimated quality parameters. We find that the heart can be treated as a good enough, and private by its nature, source of randomness that every human possesses. As such, in principle, it can be used as input to quantum device-independent randomness amplification protocols. The properly interpreted parameter can potentially serve as a new characteristic of the human heart from the perspective of medicine.
Highlights
Randomness is an essential resource in many applications of everyday life [1]
We concentrate on the cryptographical aspect of the heart rate data, we extend our findings to the ones with strictly medical meaning
We have considered the heart rate as a weak source of randomness in the context of quantum methods of its amplification
Summary
There comes a generation of passwords and tokens for online banking: most transactions are secured by random numbers sent to the user’s telephone for authentication purposes. Both public and symmetric key encryption are based on a significant amount of randomness. The choice of measurements applied to devices needs to be unknown to the eavesdropper, i.e., random with respect to him/her. For these reasons, the privacy of randomness is often the target of hackers’ attacks and can be considered one of the “Achilles’ heels” of security systems. Designing hardware that produces private randomness is a risky task, as recent attacks on such devices show [3]
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