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Physical Review A

Examining the correctness of anonymity for practical quantum networks

Yu‐Guang Yang, Yongli Yang, Xin-Long Lv, Yi‐Hua Zhou, Wei‐Min Shi

Published Jun 4, 2020• 23 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In a recent paper [A. Unnikrishnan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 240501 (2019)], a quantum anonymous communication protocol was proposed in the presence of malicious agents and an untrusted source. Here, we point out that malicious agents can change the generated anonymous entanglement between the sender and the receiver without being detected, which means that the correctness of the generated anonymous entanglement should be reexamined. The way to check the above correctness is discussed.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.101.062311

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In a recent paper [A. Unnikrishnan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 240501 (2019)], a quantum anonymous communication protocol was proposed in the presence of malicious agents and an untrusted source. Here, we point out that malicious agents can change the generated anonymous entanglement between the sender and the receiver without being detected, which means that the correctness of the generated anonymous entanglement should be reexamined. The way to check the above correctness is discussed.
Anonymity is a fundamental cryptographic primitive that hides the identities of both senders and receivers during message transmission over a network. Classical protocols cannot provide information-theoretic security for such task, and existing quantum approaches typically depend on classical subroutines and multiple private channels, thereby weakening their security in fully adversarial settings. In this work, we introduce the first fully quantum protocol for anonymous communication in realistic quantum networks with a device-independent security proof.
The phenomenal progress in quantum technologies over the past decades has laid the groundwork for the construction of quantum networks, which will channel the power of quantum theory to guarantee secure and efficient communication, computation, and much more. This thesis studies the notion of trust in quantum networks. In our information age, protecting the security or anonymity of data is a key requirement. We investigate certain protocols that are fundamental to the operation and applications of quantum networks, and propose ways to test and analyse their security, in spite of adversarial intervention. Our focus is on practical methods of verifying the untrusted components, which could be incorporated into realistic networks in the near future. To begin, we propose a protocol for authenticated communication of quantum messages, by verifying the entanglement required for quantum teleportation in an experimentally feasible way. We model the performance of our scheme in the presence of noise. Furthermore, we explore such an authenticated teleportation in the one-sided device-independent scenario, where some devices used for verification may be corrupted. We derive error-tolerant self- testing bounds and extend our results to a realistic experimental setting, demonstrating the compatibility of our protocol with state-of-the-art technology. We then study anonymity, an essential feature for communication across networks. Combining the power of classical and quantum subroutines, we build a practical protocol for anonymous communication of quantum messages, without the need to trust the players in our network, their computational power, or the entanglement they share. We end by considering the verification of graph states distributed across a network of possibly dishonest players, applying our scheme to specific graph states that are central to quantum communication and computation schemes.
We present the first quantum secure communication protocol for an anonymous receiver without the assistance of anonymous entanglement. In previous works, if a public sender wants to send quantum messages to a chosen receiver while protecting the identity of the receiver from others, all participants should cooperate first to construct the entanglement between the sender and the anonymous receiver. This is the most important process in anonymous quantum communications. With anonymous entanglement, the sender can communicate quantum messages to the anonymous receiver by applying teleportation protocols. In contrast, our protocol is novel and achieves communication of quantum messages directly from the public sender to the anonymous receiver based on the quantum one-time pad and current achievements. Notably, the anonymity of the receiver, as well as the privacy of the quantum messages, is perfectly protected with the exception of an exponentially small probability in our protocol.
Abstract Secure communication is one of the key applications of quantum networks. In recent years, following the demands for identity protection in classical communication protocols, the need for anonymity has also emerged for quantum networks. Here, we demonstrate that quantum physics allows parties—besides communicating securely over a network—to also keep their identities secret. We implement such an anonymous quantum conference key agreement by sharing multipartite entangled states in a quantum network. We demonstrate the protocol with four parties and establish keys in subsets of the network—different combinations of two and three parties—whilst keeping the participating parties anonymous. We additionally show that the protocol is verifiable and run multiple key generation and verification routines. Our work thus addresses one of the key challenges of networked communication: keeping the identities of the communicating parties private.
Hiding the identity of involved participants in the network, known as anonymity, is a crucial issue in some cryptographic applications such as electronic voting systems, auctions, digital signatures, and Byzantine agreements. This paper proposes a new anonymous quantum teleportation protocol based on counterfactual communication where no information-carrying particles pass through the channel. It is achieved by the distribution of a counterfactual entanglement among the participants in the network followed by the establishment of an anonymous entanglement between the sender and the receiver. Afterwards, the sender can anonymously teleport a quantum state to the receiver by utilizing the anonymous entanglement. However, the practicality of the anonymous quantum network mainly calls for two performance measures-robustness against adversarial attacks and noisy environments. Motivated by these demands, firstly, we prove the security of our proposed protocol and show that it achieves both the sender and receiver's anonymity in the presence of active adversaries and untrusted parties. Along with anonymity, we also ensure the correctness of the protocol and the privacy of the teleported qubit. Finally, we analyze the robustness of our proposed protocol under the presence of channel noise and compare its fidelity with those of the conventional protocols. The main advantage of our proposed protocol is that it can provide useful anonymous quantum resources for teleportation under noisy environment with a higher security compared to previous protocols.