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Acta Physica Sinica

Information leakage problem in quantum secure direct communication protocol based on the mixture of Bell state particles and single photons

Zhihao Liu, Hanwu Chen

Published Jan 1, 2017• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Recently, a quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol based on the mixture of Bell state particles and single photons[Acta Phys. Sin. 65 230301(2016)] was put forward. In this QSDC protocol, the single photons and the Bell states were both used as information carriers. To be specific, each Bell state as well as single photon was encoded by three bits of classical information. After the sender told the receiver how to measure the particles, the receiver could read out the secret message sent by the sender. Speciously, the information transmission efficiency of this protocol was high. Unfortunately, there exists the information leakage problem in this protocol. When the sender announces that the receiver uses the Z-basis to measure a single photon, everyone knows that the sent secret message is 000 or 001, that is, the first two bits are leaked out; when the sender announces that the receiver uses the X-basis to measure a single photon, everyone knows that the sent secret message is 010 or 011, that is, the first two bits are leaked out too; when the sender announces that the receiver uses the Bell-basis to measure a pair of particles from a Bell state, everyone knows that the sent secret message is 100, 101, 110 or 111, that is, the first bit is leaked out. In a word, two of the three bits of classical information encoded in a single photon, and one of the three bits of classical information encoded in a Bell state are leaked out. Therefore, this scheme is not secure. On the basis of keeping the original idea and changing the contents of the protocol as less as possible, we put forward an improved message encoding rule to solve the information leakage problem, that is, the single photon is only encoded by one bit of classical information, and the Bell state is only encoded by two bits of classical information. In fact, this makes the information capacity of the improved protocol achieves the Helovo bound. So it has high coding capacity. We hope researchers pay more attention to the information leakage problem in quantum secure communication protocols, and thus design truly secure ones.

DOI
10.7498/aps.66.130304

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Recently, a quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol based on the mixture of Bell state particles and single photons[Acta Phys. Sin. 65 230301(2016)] was put forward. In this QSDC protocol, the single photons and the Bell states were both used as information carriers. To be specific, each Bell state as well as single photon was encoded by three bits of classical information. After the sender told the receiver how to measure the particles, the receiver could read out the secret message sent by the sender. Speciously, the information transmission efficiency of this protocol was high. Unfortunately, there exists the information leakage problem in this protocol. When the sender announces that the receiver uses the Z-basis to measure a single photon, everyone knows that the sent secret message is 000 or 001, that is, the first two bits are leaked out; when the sender announces that the receiver uses the X-basis to measure a single photon, everyone knows that the sent secret message is 010 or 011, that is, the first two bits are leaked out too; when the sender announces that the receiver uses the Bell-basis to measure a pair of particles from a Bell state, everyone knows that the sent secret message is 100, 101, 110 or 111, that is, the first bit is leaked out. In a word, two of the three bits of classical information encoded in a single photon, and one of the three bits of classical information encoded in a Bell state are leaked out. Therefore, this scheme is not secure. On the basis of keeping the original idea and changing the contents of the protocol as less as possible, we put forward an improved message encoding rule to solve the information leakage problem, that is, the single photon is only encoded by one bit of classical information, and the Bell state is only encoded by two bits of classical information. In fact, this makes the information capacity of the improved protocol achieves the Helovo bound. So it has high coding capacity. We hope researchers pay more attention to the information leakage problem in quantum secure communication protocols, and thus design truly secure ones.
By studying the properties of the mixture of Bell state particles and single photons,in the paper we design a quantum code scheme with high coding capacity,and propose a novel quantum secure direct communication protocol with high transmission efficiency.Alice prepares Bell state particles and single photons,and divides Bell state particles into two sequences SA and SB.SB is sent to Bob for the first security check through using quantum correlation properties of particles.When the check result shows that the quantum channel is safe,by using the designed quantum code scheme, Alice encodes her classical message on the mixed quantum state sequence of Bell sequence SA and single photon sequence SS.Then,some single photons that are used for security check are re-inserted randomly into the encoded sequence,and the order of particles is rearranged to ensure checking Eve's attack.Alice sends the new sequence to Bob.Bob delays and receives it.And then,the quantum channel conducts the second-time security check.The transmission error rate is calculated,and if the error rate is lower than the tolerance threshold,the channel is safe.Bob decodes and reads Alice's message.The first security check is to determine whether quantum channel is safe.The second security check is to test whether there are eavesdroppers during information transmission.Safety analysis is done by applying the quantum information theory for the proposed protocol.The error rate introduced by Eve and the amount of information by Eve are calculated.It is shown that this pro-tocol can effectively resist measurement-resend attack,intercept-resend attack, auxiliary particle attack,denial of service attack and Trojan attack.Among them,auxiliary particle attack is analyzed in detail.The transmission efficiency and coding capacity are also analyzed.The transmission efficiency is 2,the quantum bit rate is 1,and the coding capacity is that a quantum state can encode three bits of classical messages.We also compare the proposed protocol with many existing popular protocols in the sense of efficiency,e.g.,Ping-Pong protocol, Deng F G et al.'s two-step and one-pad-time quantum secure direct communication protocol,Wang J et al.'s quantum secure direct communication protocol based on entanglement swapping and Quan D X et al.'s one-way quantum secure direct communication protocol based on single photon.It is proved that this proposed protocol has higher transmission efficiency.In addition,neither complex U operation nor entanglement swapping is used,and implementation process is simplified.However,this protocol is devoted to theoretical research of quantum secure direct communication.There are still some difficulties in the practical application.For example,the storage technology of quantum states is not mature at present.It is not easy to prepare and measure Bell state particles nor to combine them with single photons,and so on.The implementation of this protocol depends on the development of quantum technology in the future.
In response to the demand for identity authentication in quantum secure direct communication, this paper proposes a quantum secure direct communication scheme based on a mixture of single photon and Bell state, by combining the bidirectional identity authentication. Before communication begins, both parties share a series of secret information to prepare a series of single photon and Bell state particles. Encoding four single photons and four Bell states yields eight types of encoded information, followed by identity authentication. The first step in identity authentication is to use a single photon to verify the legitimacy of the receiver. If the error exceeds the given threshold, it indicates the presence of eavesdropping. Otherwise, the channel is safe. Then, Bell state particles are used to verify the legitimacy of the sender, and the threshold is also used to determine whether there is eavesdropping. The present method is the same as previous one. If the error rate is higher than the given threshold, it indicates the existence of third-party eavesdropping. Otherwise, it indicates that the channel is secure. As for the specific verification method, it will be explained in detail in the article. Afterwards, Bell state particles are mixed with a single photon as a transmission carrier, and eavesdropping detection particles are added whenever the quantum state is sent. However, once the eavesdropper intercepts the transmitted particles, owing to incomplete information obtained, the eavesdropper is unable to recover the original information, and the eavesdropping behavior will be immediately detected, thus terminating communication. In this scheme, single photon and Bell states are fully utilized, and hybrid communication can effectively improve transmission efficiency, encoding capability, and quantum bit utilization. Security analysis shows that this scheme can resist common external and internal attacks such as interception/measurement replay attacks, auxiliary particle attacks, and identity impersonation attacks. The analysis of efficiency and encoding capacity shows that the transmission efficiency of this scheme is 1, the encoding capacity is 3 bits per state, and the quantum bit utilization rate is 1. Compared with other schemes, this scheme has significant advantages because it uses different particles for bidirectional authentication, making it more difficult for attackers to crack, and thus it has higher security than traditional schemes.
The security of controlled bidirectional quantum direct communication using a GHZ state [Chin. Phys. Lett. 23 (2006) 1680] is analyzed. It turns out that the MX protocol has the problem of definite information leakage, i.e., the first bit of a secret message from any communication party is always leaked out without any active attack after the controller's announcement of measurement results. We put forward two approaches to improve this. The first is to merely modify the encoding rule of the MX protocol, while the second is to use a Bell state as the quantum resource instead of a GHZ state. Both our approaches can ensure that all the bits of secret messages from two communication parties are not leaked out after the controller's announcement of measurement results. Moreover, the controlled bidirectional quantum secure direct communication protocol based on the second approach is more convenient to implement than the MX protocol, since it merely uses a Bell state as the quantum resource and only needs to perform the Bell-basis measurement.
Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) can transmit secret messages directly from one user to another without first establishing a shared secret key, which is different from quantum key distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel quantum secure direct communication protocol based on signal photons and Bell states. Before the execution of the proposed protocol, two participants Alice and Bob exchange their corresponding identity IDA and IDB through quantum key distribution and keep them secret, respectively. Then the message sender, Alice, encodes each secret message bit into two single photons (| 01〉or|10〉) or a Bell state , and composes an ordered secret message sequence. To insure the security of communication, Alice also prepares the decoy photons and inserts them into secret message sequence on the basis of the values of IDA and IDB. By the secret identity IDA and IDB, both sides of the communication can check eavesdropping and identify each other. The proposed protocol not only completes secure direct communication, but also realizes the mutual authentication. The security analysis of the proposed protocol is presented in the paper. The analysis results show that this protocol is secure against some common attacks, and no secret message leaks even if the messages are broken. Compared with the two-way QSDC protocols, the presented protocol is a one-way quantum communication protocol which has the immunity to Trojan horse attack. Furthermore, our proposed protocol can be realized without quantum memory.
In this paper an efficient quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) scheme with authentication is presented, which is based on quantum entanglement and polarized single photons. The present protocol uses Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) pairs and polarized single photons in batches. A particle of the EPR pairs is retained in the sender's station, and the other is transmitted forth and back between the sender and the receiver, similar to the ``ping–pong'' QSDC protocol. According to the shared information beforehand, these two kinds of quantum states are mixed and then transmitted via a quantum channel. The EPR pairs are used to transmit secret messages and the polarized single photons used for authentication and eavesdropping check. Consequently, because of the dual contributions of the polarized single photons, no classical information is needed. The intrinsic efficiency and total efficiency are both 1 in this scheme as almost all of the instances are useful and each EPR pair can be used to carry two bits of information.