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Photonic Quantum Digital Signatures: An Experimental Test-Bed

Robert John Collins, Patrick J. Clarke, Vedran Dunjko, Ross J. Donaldson, John Jeffers, Erika Andersson, Gerald S. Buller

Published Jan 1, 2013• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We have built and tested the first experimental demonstration of a photonic quantum digital signature test-bed. We will present a case for quantum digital signatures, overview of the protocol, description of the system and results.
DOI
10.1364/cleo_qels.2013.jth2a.92

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As society becomes more reliant on electronic communication and transactions, ensuring the security of these interactions becomes more important. Digital signatures are a widely used form of cryptography which allows parties to certify the origins of their communications, meaning that one party, a sender, can send information to other parties in such a way that messages cannot be forged. In addition, messages are transferrable, meaning that a recipient who accepts a message as genuine can be sure that if it is forwarded to another recipient, it will again be accepted as genuine. The classical digital signature schemes currently employed typically rely on computational complexity for security. Quantum digital signatures offer the potential for increased security. In our system, quantum signature states are passed through a network of polarization maintaining fiber interferometers (a multiport) to ensure that recipients will not disagree on the validity of a message. These signatures are encoded in the phase of photonic coherent states and the choice of photon number, signature length and number of possible phase states affects the level of security possible by this approach. We will give a brief introduction into quantum digital signatures and present results from our experimental demonstration system.
Classical digital signatures are commonly used in e-mail, electronic financial transactions and other forms of electronic communications to ensure that messages have not been tampered with in transit, and that messages are transferrable. The security of commonly used classical digital signature schemes relies on the computational difficulty of inverting certain mathematical functions. However, at present, there are no such one-way functions which have been proven to be hard to invert. With enough computational resources certain implementations of classical public key cryptosystems can be, and have been, broken with current technology. It is nevertheless possible to construct information-theoretically secure signature schemes, including quantum digital signature schemes. Quantum signature schemes can be made information theoretically secure based on the laws of quantum mechanics, while classical comparable protocols require additional resources such as secret communication and a trusted authority. Early demonstrations of quantum digital signatures required quantum memory, rendering them impractical at present. Our present implementation is based on a protocol that does not require quantum memory. It also uses the new technique of unambiguous quantum state elimination, Here we report experimental results for a test-bed system, recorded with a variety of different operating parameters, along with a discussion of aspects of the system security.