This paper proposes a secure distributed transmission method that establishes multiple transmission routes in space to a destination. In the method, the transmitted information is divided into pieces of information by a secret-sharing method, and the generated pieces are separately transmitted to the destination through different transmission routes using individually-controlled antenna directivities. As the secret-sharing method can divide the transmitted information into pieces in such a manner that nothing about the original information is revealed unless all the divided pieces are obtained, the secrecy of the transmitted information is greatly improved from an information-theoretic basis. However, one problem is that it does not perform well in the vicinity around the receiver. This is due to the characteristics of distributed transmission that all distributed pieces of information must eventually gather at the destination; an eavesdropper can obtain the necessary pieces to reconstruct the original information. Then, this paper expands the distributed transmission method into a two-way communication scheme. By adopting the distributed transmission in both communication directions, a secure link can be provided as a feedback channel to enhance the secrecy of the transmitted information. The generation of the shared pieces of information is given with signal forms, and the secrecy of the proposed method is evaluated based on the signal transmission error rates as determined by computer simulation.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a way to securely expand the secret key to be used in One-time pad, and it is attracting great interest from not only theorists but also experimentalists or engineers who are aiming for the actual implementations. In this paper, we review the theoretical aspect of QKD, especially we focus on its security proof, and we briefly mention the possible problems and future directions.

We propose new key exchange and authentication protocols, which are efficient in protecting a poorly-chosen weak secret from guessing attacks, based on the use of a one-time pad and a strong one-way hash function. Cryptographic protocols assume that a strong secret should be shared between communication participants for authentication, in the light of an ever-present threat of guessing attacks. Cryptographically long secret would be better for security only if ordinary users could remember it. But most users choose an easy-to-remember password as a secret and such a weak secret can be guessed easily. In our previous work, we made much of introducing a basic concept and its application. In this paper, we describe our idea in more detail and propose more protocols which correspond to variants of our basic protocol using well-defined notations. Formal verification and efficiency comparison of the proposed protocols are also presented. By our scheme the password guessing attacks are defeated efficiently, and a session key is exchanged and participants are authenticated securely.