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arXiv:2102.00126 · Entropy

How Secure Are Two-Way Ping-Pong and LM05 QKD Protocols under a Man-in-the-Middle Attack?

Mladen Pavičić

Published Jan 29, 2021• 9 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We consider a man-in-the-middle attack on two-way quantum key distribution ping-pong and LM05 protocols in which an eavesdropper copies all messages in the message mode, while being undetectable in the mode. Under the attack there is therefore no disturbance in the message mode and the mutual information between the sender and the receiver is always constant and equal to one and messages copied by the eavesdropper are always genuine. An attack can only be detected in the control mode but the level of detection at which the protocol should be aborted is not defined. We examine steps of the protocol to evaluate its security and find that the protocol should be redesigned. We also compare it with the security of a one-way asymmetric BB84-like protocol in which one basis serves as the message mode and the other as the control mode but which does have the level of detection at which the protocol should be aborted defined.

DOI
10.3390/e23020163

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We consider a man-in-the-middle attack on two-way quantum key distribution ping-pong and LM05 protocols in which an eavesdropper copies all messages in the message mode, while being undetectable in the mode. Under the attack there is therefore no disturbance in the message mode and the mutual information between the sender and the receiver is always constant and equal to one and messages copied by the eavesdropper are always genuine. An attack can only be detected in the control mode but the level of detection at which the protocol should be aborted is not defined. We examine steps of the protocol to evaluate its security and find that the protocol should be redesigned. We also compare it with the security of a one-way asymmetric BB84-like protocol in which one basis serves as the message mode and the other as the control mode but which does have the level of detection at which the protocol should be aborted defined.
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocols theo- retically propose a high-security level based on the advantages of quantum computing. This paper analyze the security level of one of the most well-known QKD protocols, BB84, against the man-in-the-middle attack strategy. Specifically, we leverage quantum entanglement to enhance communication security by the injection of a malicious photon in the middle of transmission. In the security analysis, we measure the variation in mutual information between the sender-receiver and sender-attacker to assess the protocol's resilience against potential attacks.
Computational based cryptography might not guarantee long term security if computational algorithms, computers, and so on are made remarkable progress. Therefore, quantum cryptography with unconditionally security attracts attention. In this paper, we consider security of a two-way quantum key distribution protocol, so called Ping-Pong protocol. As a result, we introduce not only robustness but also a different information disturbance theorem, which denotes a trade-off relationship between information gain for an eavesdropper and error rate, from the related works for an attack model.
Ping-Pong protocol is a Quantum Secure Direct Communication protocol that fails to transfer a secure key or secret message optimally in a lossy or noisy channel. The reason is an eavesdropper who possibly hides in the light of these channel losses and gains information about the secure key bits or secret messages. We propose an efficient modification to the control mode of the original Ping-Pong protocol leading to the detection of an eavesdropper with a much higher probability which may not allow her to hide in the light of lossy channels. Assuming that Eve knows and makes a fixed number of right guesses about the modification in the protocol, an optimum ratio of modification can be evaluated. In addition, it is shown that incorporation of the proposed modification in the protocol doubles the eavesdropper’s detection probability for certain eavesdropping operations.
The quantum secure direct communication is a new-style quantum communication scheme. It arouses much interest recently. The ping-pong protocol proposed by Bostroem and Felbinger is one of relatively mature quantum secure direct communication protocols, which is asymptotically secure under Eve's eavesdropping attack. But it ignores the message authentication. Being aimed at this problem, we propose a novel ping-pong protocol with authentication. The former has two operation modes, or the message mode and the control mode, which are used to send message and detect Eve's attack, respectively. But it just detects Eve's eavesdropping attack and does not authenticate the sent message in the control mode. The latter has also the above two operation modes, which employs a braid-based key agreement protocol for both the parties participating in communication to share a secret, whose size and magnitude are undecided in advance. Using the shared secret, it not only detects Eve's eavesdropping attack, but also effectively performs the message authentication in the control mode. It is also asymptotically secure under Eve's eavesdropping attack. The security of the proposed protocol is based on the no-cloning theorem, the correlations of quantum entanglement and the fact that the p-th root finding problem on braid groups is intractable even on quantum computers, as well as classical computers. In addition different from the original ping-pong protocol, the communication was initiated by the sender Alice instead of by the receiver Bob. This corresponds to the way of common communications. The present protocol not only can resist the attacks known recently, but should be experimentally feasible using today's technology.
A security layer for the asymptotically secure ping-pong protocol is proposed and analyzed in the paper. The operation of the improvement exploits inevitable errors introduced by the eavesdropping in the control and message modes. Its role is similar to the privacy amplification algorithms known from the quantum key distribution schemes. Messages are processed in blocks which guarantees that an eavesdropper is faced with a computationally infeasible problem as long as the system parameters are within reasonable limits. The introduced additional information preprocessing does not require quantum memory registers and confidential communication is possible without prior key agreement or some shared secret.