The security of quantum noise stream cipher against collective attacks

Shuaidong Chen, Bo Liu, Jianxin Ren +11 more

马乐 Ma Le, 张杰 Zhang Jie, 王博 Wang Bo +6 more

Zhaoyun Li, Yukun Zhang, Hai-Yue Pang +5 more

Jonathan L. Ball

Mingrui Zhang, Yajie Li, Haokun Song +3 more

Quantum noise stream cipher where encrypted signals are masked by quantum noise and ASE noise provides a physical layer of security. It requires the transmitter and the receiver to share a stream cipher that is generated from a PRNG. Yet a correlation attack threatens its security due to the mathematical properties of PRNG. This paper discusses the security of QNSC system under correlation attacks. Our experiment results find that the security of the whole system depends on the cycle to refresh the seed key and the correlation between the incepted running key, original running key, and seed key. Furthermore, it is important to provide security for the QNSC system by maintaining low optical power. Besides, this new analytical method provides quantitative security analysis for a QNSC system under a correlation attack.

Osamu Hirota, Kaoru Kurosawa

This paper presents the security analysis on the quantum stream cipher so called Yuen-2000 protocol (or $αη$ scheme) against the fast correlation attack, the typical attack on stream ciphers. Although a very simple experimental model of the quantum stream cipher without a random mapper may be decrypted in the information theoretic sense by the fast correlation algorithm, it is not a basic feature of Yuen 2000 protocol. In fact, we clarify that there exists a randomization scheme which attains the perfect correlation immunity against such attacks under an approximation. And in this scheme, the running key correlation from the second randomization that determines the mapping patterns is dismissed also by quantum noise. In such a case, any fast correlation attack does not work on the quantum stream cipher.