With the emergence of the multi-party quantum key agreement, the participant attack has attracted great attention, since it is a destructive attack which is easier to obtain the effective information than the external attack. In this paper, a new multi-party quantum key agreement protocol with six-qubit cluster states which has the verification function is put forward. At first, a verifiable distributor is introduced to distribute the remaining information of six-qubit cluster states to any two adjacent participants after preserving a part. Next, once the participants verify the correctness of the received information with the properties of six-qubit cluster states under the X-basis, the cluster states are used as the quantum resource to perform the X operation in the participant operation phase. Finally, it can not only verify the correctness of the recovered shared key, but also guarantee its simultaneity through the trusted design combiner and homomorphic hash function. Furthermore, the security analysis shows that the new protocol can resist the external and internal attacks. And it's proved that our protocol is meaningful through the comparation analysis.
With the emergence of the multi-party quantum key agreement, the participant attack has attracted great attention, since it is a destructive attack which is easier to obtain the effective information than the external attack. In this paper, a new multi-party quantum key agreement protocol with six-qubit cluster states which has the verification function is put forward. At first, a verifiable distributor is introduced to distribute the remaining information of six-qubit cluster states to any two adjacent participants after preserving a part. Next, once the participants verify the correctness of the received information with the properties of six-qubit cluster states under the X-basis, the cluster states are used as the quantum resource to perform the X operation in the participant operation phase. Finally, it can not only verify the correctness of the recovered shared key, but also guarantee its simultaneity through the trusted design combiner and homomorphic hash function. Furthermore, the security analysis shows that the new protocol can resist the external and internal attacks. And it's proved that our protocol is meaningful through the comparation analysis.
Abstract Quantum key agreement (QKA) is an important cryptographic primitive that plays a pivotal role in private communications. Authenticated QKA plays an important role in QKA. In this paper, we propose an authenticated multiparty QKA scheme based on 4-qubit cluster states entanglement swapping. The scheme is divided into two parts, the first part is the quantum identity authentication stage, and the second part is the QKA stage. In the quantum identity authentication stage, the participants determine that the participant communicating with them is the claimed person through mutual authentication, which can avoid the impersonation attack of the eavesdropper Eve. In the QKA phase, the participants adopt a bidirectional transmission structure with the participation of a semi-trusted third party, and based on the entanglement swapping property of the 4-qubit cluster state, the QKA is finally realized. Detailed security analysis shows that the protocol can resist a variety of internal and external attacks, such as participants attack, entangle-measure attack, and so on.
Quantum key agreement is a promising key establishing protocol that can play a significant role in securing 5G/6G communication networks. Recently, Liu et al. (Quantum Information Processing 18(8):1-10, 2019) proposed a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol based on four-qubit cluster states was proposed. The aim of their protocol is to agree on a shared secret key among multiple remote participants. Liu et al. employed four-qubit cluster states to be the quantum resources and the X operation to securely share a secret key. In addition, Liu et al.'s protocol guarantees that each participant makes an equal contribution to the final key. The authors also claimed that the proposed protocol is secure against participant attack and dishonest participants cannot generate the final shared key alone. However, we show here that Liu et al. protocol is insecure against a collusive attack, where dishonest participants can retrieve the private inputs of a trustworthy participant without being caught. Additionally, the corresponding modifications are presented to address these security flaws in Liu et al.'s protocol.
Although there are many quantum key agreement protocols currently in existence, they cannot be merged in terms of resource utilisation, efficiency, security, and other aspects, and there are also significant differences in the nature of two and more parties. Therefore, it is necessary to design a quantum key agreement protocol that can balance efficiency and security and is suitable for multiple participants. In view of this, this paper proposes a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol based on a new coding mode of bell state: temporary session keys are negotiated between adjacent participants, and then shared keys for all participants are negotiated through the exchange, conversion, and computation of quantum resources. During the implementation of the protocol, not only can the identity of the participants be authenticated, but also the quantum resources used are single, and the quantum operations performed are simple. Moreover, efficiency is fixed and does not decrease due to the increase of participants or quantum resources. In addition, the protocol also allows participants to dynamically join and leave. In terms of security, the protocol can resist most common quantum attacks. Under the existing quantum technology, this protocol is completely feasible.
Although there are many quantum key agreement protocols currently in existence, they cannot be merged in terms of resource utilisation, efficiency, security, and other aspects, and there are also significant differences in the nature of two and more parties. Therefore, it is necessary to design a quantum key agreement protocol that can balance efficiency and security and is suitable for multiple participants. In view of this, this paper proposes a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol based on a new coding mode of bell state: temporary session keys are negotiated between adjacent participants, and then shared keys for all participants are negotiated through the exchange, conversion, and computation of quantum resources. During the implementation of the protocol, not only can the identity of the participants be authenticated, but also the quantum resources used are single, and the quantum operations performed are simple. Moreover, efficiency is fixed and does not decrease due to the increase of participants or quantum resources. In addition, the protocol also allows participants to dynamically join and leave. In terms of security, the protocol can resist most common quantum attacks. Under the existing quantum technology, this protocol is completely feasible.
Abstract:In order to solve the problem that the multi-particle joint measurements are difficult to implement with the existing technology in the quantum key agreement protocols based on multi-particle entangled states , a new two-party quantum key agreement protocol was proposed based on three-particle GHZ states. Two participants in the protocol could fairly establish a shared secret key by using the measurement correlation property of three-particle GHZ states and the delayed measurement technique. Since the new protocol only used Bell measurements and single particle measurements, it was easy to achieve on the basis of the existing technology. The security analysis showed that the protocol could not only resist against participant attacks and outsider attacks, but also resist against two kinds of Trojan horse attacks. The protocol was secure not only in the noise-free quantum channel but also in the quantum noise channel. Finally, the comparison with the existed secure two-party protocols showed that the protocol also achieved higher qubit efficiency.
In this study, we propose a single-state multi-party quantum key agreement (MQKA) protocol with single-particle measurement. Firstly, a single-state three-party quantum key agreement protocol with single-particle measurement is introduced, followed by a security analysis that validated its capability to resist potential internal and external attacks. Furthermore, we utilize multi-particle entangled states to present a multi-party version of the single-state multi-party quantum key agreement with single-particle measurement. In comparison to previous MQKA protocols, our approach presents the following advantages: it employs one kind of multi-particle entangled state as the quantum resource; eliminates the need for entanglement swapping techniques, unitary operations, or pre-shared keys between participants; uses only the X measurement basis and Z measurement basis; transmits fewer qubits; consumes fewer qubits; and has higher qubit efficiency.