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International Conference on Communications

Quantum Coin-Flipping-Based Authentication

Stefan Raß, Peter Schartner, Michaela Greiler

Published Jun 1, 2009• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum cryptographic key distribution (QKD) is a promising candidate for achieving unconditional security, making the renowned one-time pad encryption technically feasible for building computer networks. However, although well-developed theoretical foundations perfectly ensure protection against eavesdropping, no natural mechanism is yet able to successfully repel an adversary sitting between Alice and Bob, performing QKD with both and re-encrypting each message after heaving read it in plain text. Authentication is hence of crucial importance, and normally applied to all messages that are related to the public discussion part of the QKD protocol. We present an analysis of a scenario, in which authentication is postponed until the end of the QKD protocol. This yields to reduced computational effort, as well as simple and tight bounds on the amount of pre-shared key material. Our solution relies on a combination of quantum key distribution and quantum coin-flipping, which ensures non- controllability of the QKD key. Based on this assumption, we can apply a standard fingerprint comparison for authentication, to guard the protocol against a person-in-the-middle attack.

DOI
10.1109/icc.2009.5199383

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Quantum cryptographic key distribution (QKD) is a promising candidate for achieving unconditional security, making the renowned one-time pad encryption technically feasible for building computer networks. However, although well-developed theoretical foundations perfectly ensure protection against eavesdropping, no natural mechanism is yet able to successfully repel an adversary sitting between Alice and Bob, performing QKD with both and re-encrypting each message after heaving read it in plain text. Authentication is hence of crucial importance, and normally applied to all messages that are related to the public discussion part of the QKD protocol. We present an analysis of a scenario, in which authentication is postponed until the end of the QKD protocol. This yields to reduced computational effort, as well as simple and tight bounds on the amount of pre-shared key material. Our solution relies on a combination of quantum key distribution and quantum coin-flipping, which ensures non- controllability of the QKD key. Based on this assumption, we can apply a standard fingerprint comparison for authentication, to guard the protocol against a person-in-the-middle attack.
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.
With the development of quantum computers, traditional cryptographic systems are facing more and more serious security threats. Fortunately, quantum key distribution (QKD) and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) are two cryptographic mechanisms with quantum-resistant security, and both will become important solutions for future information security. However, neither of them is perfect, and they are complementary. Quantum key distribution has unconditional security that post-quantum cryptography does not have, and PQC can provide secure and convenient authentication for QKD networks. In this paper, we propose two protocols based on PQC to realize the full authentication of the QKD data post-processing, and we only need to assume the short-term security of PQC algorithm to ensure the long-term quantum resistant security of distributed keys. We found that for the above two authentication protocols, attackers cannot successfully implement replay attacks. These authentication protocols can solve the problems of the current pre-shared key authentication in the application of large-scale quantum key distribution networks, and are expected to realize a key distribution mechanism with practical operability and quantum resistant security, which will be beneficial to promote the deployment and application of quantum key distribution networks.
The security of quantum cryptography relies on the foundations of quantum mechanics, in contrast to traditional public key cryptography which relies on the computational difficulty of certain mathematical functions, and cannot provide any indication of eavesdropping or guarantee of key security. The proposal present in this work develops a quantum key distribution model to safeguard security in large networks, in the directions of classical cryptography and quantum cryptography. Two three-party Quantum key distribution are used in this model, one with implicit user authentication and the other with explicit mutual authentication, are proposed to demonstrate the merits of the new combination. The performance of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) systems have notably progressed since the early experimental demonstrations. The current evolutions in QKD research indicate that the pace of this progression is very likely to be maintained, if not increased, in the future years. In parallel to these improvements of QKD techniques, commercial products are also being developed, making QKD deployment a feasible alternative for securing real data networks. Deployment of a real QKD network is however far from being straightforward. It requires development of a network architecture connecting multiple users that may possibly be very far away from each other. Considering the fact that the existing QKD links are only point-to-point, and intrinsically limited in distance, deployment of a practical QKD network structure is a nontrivial problem. The proposed work describes the proposed architecture for a QKD network specify the requirements relevant to the network design, protocols, and services. The objective of this specification is to define the major components and their main features The proposal provides security against such attacks as man-in-the-middle, eavesdropping and replay. It also improves the efficiency of the quantum key distribution which contains the fewest number of communication rounds among existing Quantum key distributions. In this model two parties can share and use a long-term secret (repeatedly). To prove the security of the proposed schemes, this proposed model provides a primitive called the Unbiased-Chosen Basis (UCB) assumption with the quantum key in angular positions.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a method using some properties of quantum mechanics to create a secret shared cryptographic key even if an eavesdropper has access to unlimited computational power. All QKD protocols require that the parties have access to an authentic channel. Otherwise, QKD is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. This paper studies QKD from this point of view, emphasizing the necessity and sufficiency of using unconditionally secure authentication in QKD. In this work, a new technique of using unconditionally secure authentication is proposed for quantum cryptosystems. This technique is based on a hybrid of normal application of authentication codes and the so-called “counter-based” authentication method such that to achieve a better trade-off between security and efficiency (in terms of the required size of initially shared secret data). Based on this strategy, an authenticated version of a typical QKD protocol (the well-known BB84 protocol) is described. Some advantages of our protocol in comparison to other proposals are also highlighted.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) enables unconditionally secure communication between distinct parties using a quantum channel and an authentic public channel. Reducing the portion of quantum-generated secret keys, that is consumed during the authentication procedure, is of significant importance for improving the performance of QKD systems. In the present work, we develop a lightweight authentication protocol for QKD based on a `ping-pong' scheme of authenticity check for QKD. An important feature of this scheme is that the only one authentication tag is generated and transmitted during each of the QKD post-processing rounds. For the tag generation purpose, we design an unconditionally secure procedure based on the concept of key recycling. The procedure is based on the combination of almost universal2polynomial hashing, XOR universal2Toeplitz hashing, and one-time pad (OTP) encryption. We demonstrate how to minimize both the length of the recycled key and the size of the authentication key, that is required for OTP encryption. As a result, in real case scenarios, the portion of quantum-generated secret keys that is consumed for the authentication purposes is below 1%. Finally, we provide a security analysis of the full quantum key growing process in the framework of universally composable security.
In contrast to classical public-key cryptosystems, where the security of encoded messages relies on on computational assumptions, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) enables two distant parties to establish a shared secret key that, when combined with a one-time pad, provides information-theoretically secure encryption, provided that the QKD protocol is supported by a rigorous security proof. In the last decades, security proofs robust against a wide range of eavesdropping strategies have established the theoretical soundness of several QKD protocols. However, most proofs are based on idealized models of the physical systems involved in such protocols and often include assumptions that are not satisfied in practical implementations. This mismatch creates a gap between theoretical security guarantees and actual experimental realizations, making QKD protocols vulnerable to attacks. To ensure the security of real-world QKD systems, it is therefore essential to account for imperfections in security analyses. In this article, we present an overview of recent analytical and numerical developments in QKD security proofs, which provide a versatile approach for incorporating imperfections and re-establishing the security of quantum communication protocols under realistic conditions.