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The interlock protocol cannot save quantum cryptography from man-in-the-middle attacks

Karl Svozil

Published Jan 12, 2005• 2 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

The feasibility of the interlock protocol to prevent against man-in-the-middle attacks on quantum cryptography is discussed. If an eavesdropper succeeds to compromise the quantum as well as the classical channels and mimicks the receiver "Bob" for the sender "Alice" and vice versa, one defense strategy not requiring authentication is the successive, temporally interlocked partial transmission of the entire encrypted message.

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The feasibility of the interlock protocol to prevent against man-in-the-middle attacks on quantum cryptography is discussed. If an eavesdropper succeeds to compromise the quantum as well as the classical channels and mimicks the receiver "Bob" for the sender "Alice" and vice versa, one defense strategy not requiring authentication is the successive, temporally interlocked partial transmission of the entire encrypted message.
Several simple yet secure protocols to authenticate the quantum channel of various QKD schemes, by coupling the photon sender's knowledge of a shared secret and the QBER Bob observes, are presented. It is shown that Alice can encrypt certain portions of the information needed for the QKD protocols, using a sequence whose security is based on computational-complexity, without compromising all of the sequence's entropy. It is then shown that after a Man-in-the-Middle attack on the quantum and classical channels, there is still enough entropy left in the sequence for Bob to detect the presence of Eve by monitoring the QBER. Finally, it is shown that the principles presented can be implemented to authenticate the quantum channel associated with any type of QKD scheme, and they can also be used for Alice to authenticate Bob.
Chang et al . [ Chin. Phys. B 23 010305 (2014)] have proposed a quantum broadcast communication and authentication protocol. However, we find that an intercept-resend attack can be preformed successfully by a potential eavesdropper, who will be able to destroy the authentication function. Afterwards, he or she can acquire the secret transmitted message or even modify it while escaping detection, by implementing an efficient man-in-the-middle attack. Furthermore, we show a simple scheme to defend this attack, that is, applying non-reusable identity strings.