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arXiv:1008.2147 · Physical Review A

Quantum tagging: Authenticating location via quantum information and relativistic signaling constraints

Adrian Kent, William J. Munro, Timothy P. Spiller

Published Jul 21, 2011• 104 citations
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Abstract

We define the task of quantum tagging, that is, authenticating the classical location of a classical tagging device by sending and receiving quantum signals from suitably located distant sites, in an environment controlled by an adversary whose quantum information processing and transmitting power is unbounded. We define simple security models for this task and briefly discuss alternatives. We illustrate the pitfalls of naive quantum cryptographic reasoning in this context by describing several protocols which at first sight appear unconditionally secure but which, as we show, can in fact be broken by teleportation-based attacks. We also describe some protocols which cannot be broken by these specific attacks, but do not prove they are unconditionally secure. We review the history of quantum tagging protocols, and show that protocols previously proposed by Malaney and Chandran et al. are provably insecure.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.84.012326

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We define the task of quantum tagging, that is, authenticating the classical location of a classical tagging device by sending and receiving quantum signals from suitably located distant sites, in an environment controlled by an adversary whose quantum information processing and transmitting power is unbounded. We define simple security models for this task and briefly discuss alternatives. We illustrate the pitfalls of naive quantum cryptographic reasoning in this context by describing several protocols which at first sight appear unconditionally secure but which, as we show, can in fact be broken by teleportation-based attacks. We also describe some protocols which cannot be broken by these specific attacks, but do not prove they are unconditionally secure. We review the history of quantum tagging protocols, and show that protocols previously proposed by Malaney and Chandran et al. are provably insecure.
Various authors have considered schemes for quantum tagging, that is, authenticating the classical location of a classical tagging device by sending and receiving quantum signals from suitably located distant sites, in an environment controlled by an adversary whose quantum information processing and transmitting power is potentially unbounded. All of the schemes proposed elsewhere in the literature assume that the adversary is able to inspect the interior of the tagging device. All of these schemes have been shown to be breakable if the adversary has unbounded predistributed entanglement. We consider here the case in which the tagging device contains a finite key string shared with distant sites but kept secret from the adversary, and show this allows the location of the tagging device to be authenticated securely and indefinitely. Our protocol relies on quantum key distribution between the tagging device and at least one distant site, and demonstrates a new practical application of quantum key distribution. It also illustrates that the attainable security in position-based cryptography can depend crucially on apparently subtle details in the security scenario considered.
Recently, position-based quantum cryptography has been claimed to be unconditionally secure. On the contrary, here we show that the existing proposals for position-based quantum cryptography are, in fact, insecure if entanglement is shared among two adversaries. Specifically, we demonstrate how the adversaries can incorporate ideas of quantum teleportation and quantum secret sharing to compromise the security with certainty. The common flaw to all current protocols is that the Pauli operators always map a codeword to a codeword (up to an irrelevant overall phase). We propose a modified scheme lacking this property in which the same cheating strategy used to undermine the previous protocols can succeed with a rate of at most 8585%85. We prove the modified protocol is secure when the shared quantum resource between the adversaries is a two- or three-level system.
Quantum cryptography offers a way of key agreement, which is unbreakable by any external adversary. Authentication is of crucial importance, as perfect secrecy is worthless if the identity of the addressee cannot be ensured before sending important information. Message authentication has been studied thoroughly, but no approach seems to be able to explicitly counter meet-in-the-middle impersonation attacks. The goal of this paper is the development of an authentication scheme being resistant against active adversaries controlling the communication channel. The scheme is built on top of a key-establishment protocol and is unconditionally secure if built upon quantum cryptographic key exchange. In general, the security is the same as for the key-agreement protocol lying underneath.
In this thesis we explore position-based quantum cryptography zooming in on the task of position verification. In position verification, the idea is to use an individual's geographical location as a cryptographic credential. In practice, such protocols can authenticate that a message originated from a specific location or ensure that messages can only be read at a certain location. In a position-verification protocol, the limitations imposed by the speed of light, as described by special relativity, are used to verify that a party is at their claimed location. It has been shown that any QPV protocol can be broken by attackers that use an amount of entanglement exponential in the input size. However, from a practical point of view, not all is lost. We can still hope for QPV protocols that are secure in practice. This raises the problem of designing protocols that are secure in a practical setting. An important problem that arises is that of signal loss. Signal loss can be detrimental as it allows attackers to only answer on a subset of rounds. We investigate several questions related to the practical implementation of such protocols. We propose a new experimentally feasible protocol, which is fully loss-tolerant against attackers restricted to classical communication. Furthermore, we consider the role of allowing quantum communication with no pre-shared entanglement for attackers and show that this setting is strictly stronger than the classical one, indicating that allowing for quantum communication may break security. Conversely, we then show that any protocol secure against classical communication can be transformed into a protocol secure against quantum communication. Finally, we invert the picture, and consider the task of non-local quantum computation (NLQC), which corresponds to the operations of the attackers in a QPV protocol. We connect NLQC to the wider context of information-theoretic cryptography by relating it to a number of other cryptographic primitives.
We discuss protocols for quantum position verification schemes based on the standard quantum cryptographic assumption that a tagging device can keep classical data secure [Kent, 2011]. Our schemes use a classical key replenished by quantum key distribution. The position verification requires no quantum communication or quantum information processing. The security of classical data makes the schemes secure against non-local spoofing attacks that apply to schemes that do not use secure tags. The schemes are practical with current technology and allow for errors and losses. We describe how a proof-of-principle demonstration might be carried out.
Quantum digital signatures can be used to authenticate classical messages in an information-theoretically secure way. Previously, a novel quantum digital signature for classical messages has been proposed and gave an experimental demonstration of distributing quantum digital signatures from one sender to two receivers. Some improvement versions were subsequently presented, which made it more feasible with present technology. These proposals for quantum digital signatures are basic building blocks which only deal with the problem of sending single bit messages while no-forging and non-repudiation are guaranteed. For a multi-bit message, it is only mentioned that the basic building blocks must be iterated, but the iteration of the basic building block still does not suffice to define the entire protocol. In this paper, we show that it is necessary to define the entire protocol because some attacks will arise if these building blocks are used in a naive way of iteration. Therefore, we give a way of defining an entire protocol to deal with the problem of sending multi-bit messages based on the basic building blocks and analyse its security.