Quantum communication networks are connected by various devices to achieve communication or distributed computing for users in remote locations. In order to solve the problem of generating temporary session key for secure communication in optical-ring quantum networks, a quantum key agreement protocol is proposed. In the key agreement protocols, an attacker can impersonate a legal user to participate in the negotiation process and eavesdrop the agreement key easily. This is often overlooked in most quantum key agreement protocols, which makes them insecure in practical implementation. Considering this problem, the function of authenticating the user’s identity is added in the proposed protocol. Combining classical hash function with identity information, we design the authentication operation conforming to the characteristics of quantum search algorithm. In the security analysis of the proposed protocol, quantum state discrimination is utilized to show that the protocol is secure against common attacks and impersonation attack. In addition, only single photons need to be prepared and measured, which makes our protocol feasible with existing technology.
Quantum communication networks are connected by various devices to achieve communication or distributed computing for users in remote locations. In order to solve the problem of generating temporary session key for secure communication in optical-ring quantum networks, a quantum key agreement protocol is proposed. In the key agreement protocols, an attacker can impersonate a legal user to participate in the negotiation process and eavesdrop the agreement key easily. This is often overlooked in most quantum key agreement protocols, which makes them insecure in practical implementation. Considering this problem, the function of authenticating the user’s identity is added in the proposed protocol. Combining classical hash function with identity information, we design the authentication operation conforming to the characteristics of quantum search algorithm. In the security analysis of the proposed protocol, quantum state discrimination is utilized to show that the protocol is secure against common attacks and impersonation attack. In addition, only single photons need to be prepared and measured, which makes our protocol feasible with existing technology.
Although there are many quantum key agreement protocols currently in existence, they cannot be merged in terms of resource utilisation, efficiency, security, and other aspects, and there are also significant differences in the nature of two and more parties. Therefore, it is necessary to design a quantum key agreement protocol that can balance efficiency and security and is suitable for multiple participants. In view of this, this paper proposes a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol based on a new coding mode of bell state: temporary session keys are negotiated between adjacent participants, and then shared keys for all participants are negotiated through the exchange, conversion, and computation of quantum resources. During the implementation of the protocol, not only can the identity of the participants be authenticated, but also the quantum resources used are single, and the quantum operations performed are simple. Moreover, efficiency is fixed and does not decrease due to the increase of participants or quantum resources. In addition, the protocol also allows participants to dynamically join and leave. In terms of security, the protocol can resist most common quantum attacks. Under the existing quantum technology, this protocol is completely feasible.
Although there are many quantum key agreement protocols currently in existence, they cannot be merged in terms of resource utilisation, efficiency, security, and other aspects, and there are also significant differences in the nature of two and more parties. Therefore, it is necessary to design a quantum key agreement protocol that can balance efficiency and security and is suitable for multiple participants. In view of this, this paper proposes a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol based on a new coding mode of bell state: temporary session keys are negotiated between adjacent participants, and then shared keys for all participants are negotiated through the exchange, conversion, and computation of quantum resources. During the implementation of the protocol, not only can the identity of the participants be authenticated, but also the quantum resources used are single, and the quantum operations performed are simple. Moreover, efficiency is fixed and does not decrease due to the increase of participants or quantum resources. In addition, the protocol also allows participants to dynamically join and leave. In terms of security, the protocol can resist most common quantum attacks. Under the existing quantum technology, this protocol is completely feasible.
In quantum secure multi-party summation protocols, some attackers can impersonate legitimate participants in the summation process, and easily steal the summation results from the participants. This is often overlooked for existing secure multi-party summation protocols, thus rendering them insecure. Based on commutative encryption, a quantum secure multi-party summation protocol with identity authentication is proposed in this paper. In the protocol, each participant encodes a secret integer on photons via unitary operations. At the same time, a one-way hash function technique with a key is utilized to perform identity authentication operations for each participant. Finally, the summation is calculated with the help of a semi-trusted third party. The analysis of the protocol shows that the proposed protocol is correct and resistant to common and impersonation attacks. Compared to related protocols, the use and measurement of single photons makes the protocol easier to implement into existing technology. Furthermore, the simulation experiments on the IBM Q Experience cloud platform demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented protocol.
In this paper, we discuss in some detail how multiparty quantum key agreement protocols must be carefully designed and present a collusion attack to illustrate this point. Then, a secure circle-type multiparty quantum key agreement with Bell states is proposed. Bell states are used as the information carriers and transmitted among the participants, who embed their secrets into the traveling particles via certain encoding operations. In this way, all participants simultaneously obtain the same agreement key, i.e., the sum of their secret inputs, at the end of the protocol. Here, quantum state discrimination is utilized to design the encoding operations, which ensures that the proposed protocol is correct and secure against the presented collusion attack. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed protocol satisfies three conditions of a secure quantum key agreement protocol in theory. In addition, these encoding operations consist of some common single-qubit gates, the Hadamard operator and four Pauli operators, which makes the proposed protocol feasible using current technology.
Based on the entanglement feature of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, a multi-user quantum key distribution with mutual authentication is proposed. In the protocol, a semi-trusted third party, who may misbehave on its own but will conspire with none of the participants, is introduced to help arbitrary two users on a quantum network to achieve this secure task. Firstly, the third party prepares a three-particle entangled state. Then, he keeps one particle in his hand, and sends two particles to these two users respectively. Meanwhile, a keyed one-way hash function is utilized to generate an authentication message, in terms of which three parties respectively make an appropriate single-particle measurement on the particles in their hands. According to the measurement results, the third party can verify the identity of one user. It implies that one user is able to authenticate the other user with the assistance of the third party. After that, two participants use the remainder measurement results to generate a common session key. Moreover, the practical implementation of the presented protocol is discussed, which illustrates that this protocol is feasible under the current techniques. In the end, the security of the presented protocol is analyzed. It is shown that this protocol is secure in theory by proving that the presented protocol can stand against several common attacks.
Abstract Identification and key negotiation between trusted users play a pivot role in generating a session key. The existing protocol uses quantum resources with memory for authentication process but the storage time for qubit is limited. A new mutual authentication quantum key agreement protocol was proposed using Bell pair and the pre-shared key act as the basis for applying bell state measurement without storing the qubit. Security of the proposed protocol depends on inappropriate applying the Bell measurement in different basis leading to entanglement swapping. The participant is able to create a fair session key for each communication and mutually authenticate each identity. The key negotiation and authentication phases of the proposed mutual authentication quantum key agreement protocol have demonstrated that it is unconditional secure.