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World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Computer, Electrical, Automation, Control and Information Engineering

A Method Of Authentication For Quantum Networks

Stefan Raß

Published Dec 23, 2007• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.5281/zenodo.1083136

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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.
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.
In this paper, we have proposed a two-party authenticated key establishment (AKE), and authenticated key transport protocols based on lattice-based cryptography, aiming to provide security against quantum attacks for secure communication. This protocol enables two parties, who may share long-term public keys, to securely establish a shared session key, and transportation of the session key from the server while achieving mutual authentication. Our construction leverages the hardness of lattice problems Ring Learning With Errors (Ring-LWE), ensuring robustness against quantum and classical adversaries. Unlike traditional schemes whose security depends upon number-theoretic assumptions being vulnerable to quantum attacks, our protocol ensures security in the post-quantum era. The proposed protocol ensures forward secrecy, and provides security even if the long-term key is compromised. This protocol also provides essential property key freshness and resistance against man-in-the-middle attacks, impersonation attacks, replay attacks, and key mismatch attacks. On the other hand, the proposed key transport protocol provides essential property key freshness, anonymity, and resistance against man-in-the-middle attacks, impersonation attacks, replay attacks, and key mismatch attacks. A two-party key transport protocol is a cryptographic protocol in which one party (typically a trusted key distribution center or sender) securely generates and sends a session key to another party. Unlike key exchange protocols (where both parties contribute to key generation), key transport protocols rely on one party to generate the key and deliver it securely. The protocol possesses a minimum number of exchanged messages and can reduce the number of communication rounds to help minimize the communication overhead.
In this review, we survey the cryptographic task of authentication from the perspective of quantum communication. We review three main flavours of authentication that are often conflated in the literature: authentication of classical messages, authentication of quantum messages, and entity authentication, also covering recent hardware-assisted approaches. We compare representative protocols for each functionality in terms of their security assumptions, set-up requirements, composability, and scalability in large or dynamic networks, and use these criteria to identify and recommend suitable candidates. Finally, applications are surveyed: we provide a detailed case study of authentication and quantum key distribution (QKD), then extend the discussion to protocols beyond QKD, where the role of authentication is more complex. Our take-home message is that an authentication requirement is not an intrinsic limitation of quantum networks: as with all secure communication, each protocol relies on a particular authentication resource, and the security claim of that protocol is meaningful only once the authentication resource and its deployment assumptions are made explicit. At the same time, the existing classical and quantum literature already offers a range of quantum-secure authentication schemes, which can support different applications when carefully matched to the required functionality, assumptions, and security guarantees.
Authenticated key agreement protocol is one of the important cryptographic primitives to ensure secure communication in an open network. Certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) represents an interesting and potentially useful balance between public key cryptography based on certificates and identity-based cryptography. The topic of CL-PKC has undergone quite rapid development with schemes being proposed for encryption and signatures, while certificateless authenticated key agreement protocols are seldom discussed. In this paper, we present a secure two-party authenticated key agreement protocol based on an efficient certificateless public key encryption with pairing. Such a scheme achieves almost all of the security attributes, including known-key secrecy, perfect forward secrecy, PKG forward secrecy, key-compromise impersonation resilience, unknown key-share resilience, known session-specific temporary information security, message independence and no key control. Meanwhile, it is also practical with nice efficiency.