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arXiv:1711.09843 · Entropy

Quantum Contract Signing with Entangled Pairs

Preeti Yadav, Paulo Mateus, Nikola Paunković, André Souto

Published Aug 22, 2019• 11 citations

Abstract

We present a quantum scheme for signing contracts between two clients (Alice and Bob) using entangled states and the services of a third trusted party (Trent). The trusted party is only contacted for the initialization of the protocol, and possibly at the end, to verify clients’ honesty and deliver signed certificates. The protocol is fair, i.e., the probability that a client, say Bob, can obtain a signed copy of the contract, while Alice cannot, can be made arbitrarily small, and scales as N − 1 / 2 , where 4 N is the total number of rounds (communications between the two clients) of the protocol. Thus, the protocol is optimistic, as cheating is not successful, and the clients rarely have to contact Trent to confirm their honesty by delivering the actual signed certificates of the contract. Unlike the previous protocol (Paunković et al., Phys. Rev. A 84, 062331 (2011)), in the present proposal, a single client can obtain the signed contract alone, without the need for the other client’s presence. When first contacting Trent, the clients do not have to agree upon a definitive contract. Moreover, even upon terminating the protocol, the clients do not reveal the actual contract to Trent. Finally, the protocol is based on the laws of physics, rather than on mathematical conjectures and the exchange of a large number of signed authenticated messages during the actual contract signing process. Therefore, it is abuse-free, as Alice and Bob cannot prove they are involved in the contract signing process.

DOI: 10.3390/e21090821

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We present a quantum scheme for signing contracts between two clients (Alice and Bob) using entangled states and the services of a third trusted party (Trent). The trusted party is only contacted for the initialization of the protocol, and possibly at the end, to verify clients’ honesty and deliver signed certificates. The protocol is fair, i.e., the probability that a client, say Bob, can obtain a signed copy of the contract, while Alice cannot, can be made arbitrarily small, and scales as N − 1 / 2 , where 4 N is the total number of rounds (communications between the two clients) of the protocol. Thus, the protocol is optimistic, as cheating is not successful, and the clients rarely have to contact Trent to confirm their honesty by delivering the actual signed certificates of the contract. Unlike the previous protocol (Paunković et al., Phys. Rev. A 84, 062331 (2011)), in the present proposal, a single client can obtain the signed contract alone, without the need for the other client’s presence. When first contacting Trent, the clients do not have to agree upon a definitive contract. Moreover, even upon terminating the protocol, the clients do not reveal the actual contract to Trent. Finally, the protocol is based on the laws of physics, rather than on mathematical conjectures and the exchange of a large number of signed authenticated messages during the actual contract signing process. Therefore, it is abuse-free, as Alice and Bob cannot prove they are involved in the contract signing process.

We present a fair and optimistic quantum-contract-signing protocol between two clients that requires no communication with the third trusted party during the exchange phase. We discuss its fairness and show that it is possible to design such a protocol for which the probability of a dishonest client to cheat becomes negligible and scales as ${N}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}$, where

N

is the number of messages exchanged between the clients. Our protocol is not based on the exchange of signed messages: Its fairness is based on the laws of quantum mechanics. Thus, it is abuse free, and the clients do not have to generate new keys for each message during the exchange phase. We discuss a real-life scenario when measurement errors and qubit-state corruption due to noisy channels and imperfect quantum memories occur and argue that for a real, good-enough measurement apparatus, transmission channels, and quantum memories, our protocol would still be fair. Apart from stable quantum memories, the other segments of our protocol could be implemented by today's technology, as they require in essence the same type of apparatus as the one needed for the Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) cryptographic protocol. Finally, we briefly discuss two alternative versions of the protocol, one that uses only two states [based on the Bennett 1992 (B92) protocol] and the other that uses entangled pairs, and show that it is possible to generalize our protocol to an arbitrary number of clients.

A fair contract-signing protocol allows two potentially mistrusted parities to exchange their commitments (i.e., digital signatures) to an agreed contract over the Internet in afairway, so that either each of them obtains the other's signature, or neither party does. Based on the RSA signature scheme, a new digital contract-signing protocol is proposed in this paper. Like the existing RSA-based solutions for the same problem, our protocol is not only fair, but also optimistic, since the trusted third party is involved only in the situations where one party is cheating or the communication channel is interrupted. Furthermore, the proposed protocol satisfies a new property-abuse-freeness. That is, if the protocol is executed unsuccessfully, none of the two parties can show the validity of intermediate results to others. Technical details are provided to analyze the security and performance of the proposed protocol. In summary, we present the first abuse-free fair contract-signing protocol based on the RSA signature, and show that it is both secure and efficient.

If two parties want to sign a contract C over a communication network, they must “simultaneously” exchange their commitments to C Since simultaneous exchange is usually impossible in practice, protocols are needed to approximate simultaneity by exchange partial commitments in a piece by piece manner The party of secondly sending commitments may have a slight advantage; a “fair” protocol must keep this advantage within acceptable limits The protocol for signing a contract is improved based on the research result of secure multiparty computation In this protocol, the parties obliviously transfer the signed bit and the committed bit; the other parties can prove the validity of this bit based on the confirming sub protocol, but he can't gain more information about the whole signature by accumulating the signed bit or the committed bit After the parties exchange the whole signed information, they declare the commitment about the signature respectively, and gain the whole signature of the other party At this moment, the party doesn't care about the advance quit of the other party, because he has gained the whole signed information Finally, it is proved that this protocol is quit fairness

An electronic contract is a contract signed by electronic means, which is widely used in electronic commerce activities. In recent years, with the rapid development of quantum cryptography technology, the quantum electronic contract has been widely studied by researchers. Supported by the basic principles of quantum mechanics, a quantum electronic contract scheme based on the single photon is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, two copies of the same contract are signed by both parties involved, and then a copy of each contract is sent to a trusted third party. The trusted third party verifies the signatures of both parties and compares the signed copies to determine whether the contract is valid. Compared with the previous scheme, this scheme is based on the quantum electronic contract signed by the single photon. Because the single photon is easy to prepare and operate, this scheme is simple and easy to implement. At the same time, the scheme does not need to exchange signatures between the two parties, which reduces the complexity of communication. Nevertheless, it requires both parties and the third party to be honest and trustworthy.

ABSTRACT As quantum technology advances, classical digital signatures exhibit vulnerabilities in preserving security properties during the transmission of information. Working toward a reliable communication protocol, we introduce a proxy blind signature scheme to teleport a single particle qubit state with a message to the receiver, employing a three qubit GHZ entangled state. The blindness property is utilized to secure the message information from the proxy signer. A trusted party, Trent, is introduced to supervise the communication process. Alice blinds the original message and sends the Bell measurements with her entangled particle to proxy signer Charlie. After receiving measurements from Alice and Charlie, Bob verifies the proxy blind signature and performs appropriate unitary operations on his particle. Thereafter, Trent verifies the security of the quantum teleportation setup by matching the output data with the original data sent by Alice. Security analysis results prove that the proposed scheme fulfils the basic security necessities, including undeniability, unforgeability, blindness, verifiability, and traceability.