Security on quantum authentication

Sumegha Garg, Henry Yuen, Mark Zhandry

We give a new class of security definitions for authentication in the quantum setting. These definitions capture and strengthen existing definitions of security against quantum adversaries for both classical message authentication codes (MACs) and well as full quantum state authentication schemes. The main feature of our definitions is that they precisely characterize the effective behavior of any adversary when the authentication protocol accepts, including correlations with the key. Our definitions readily yield a host of desirable properties and interesting consequences; for example, our security definition for full quantum state authentication implies that the entire secret key can be re-used if the authentication protocol succeeds. Next, we present several protocols satisfying our security definitions. We show that the classical Wegman-Carter authentication scheme with 3-universal hashing is secure against superposition attacks, as well as adversaries with quantum side information. We then present conceptually simple constructions of full quantum state authentication. Finally, we prove a lifting theorem which shows that, as long as a protocol can securely authenticate the maximally entangled state, it can securely authenticate any state, even those that are entangled with the adversary. Thus, this shows that protocols satisfying a fairly weak form of authentication security automatically satisfy a stronger notion of security (in particular, the definition of Dupuis, et al (2012)).

Wei Wei, Hong Mei Guo

Xin Lü, Zhi Ma, Dengguo Feng

Privacy and authenticity are two main tasks for secure communication. In this paper, a quantum authenticated encryption scheme is proposed. This scheme is devised to encrypt and authenticate classical information using quantum states. We assume that Alice and Bob share a classical bits string y as their private key. Alice generates quantum cipher text and authentication tag using her secret key. Bob can decrypt and verify the authenticity of the received message. Security analysis shows that the proposed protocol is a computationally secure encryption and statistically secure authentication scheme.

Masahito Oya, Naoto Namekata, Jun Nishikawa +1 more

Quantum secure authentication (QSA) is a novel authentication technique to prevent replicating a physical key and digital-emulating by an unauthorized access. We have been developing the QSA system using deformable mirrors. Thanks to an efficient optical setup and adaptive optics methods, a system experiment of the QSA was successfully demonstrated with an error probability of 3.7×10−3.

Christopher Battarbee, Suchetana Goswami, Elham Kashefi +1 more

In this review, we survey the cryptographic task of authentication from the perspective of quantum communication. We review three main flavours of authentication that are often conflated in the literature: authentication of classical messages, authentication of quantum messages, and entity authentication, also covering recent hardware-assisted approaches. We compare representative protocols for each functionality in terms of their security assumptions, set-up requirements, composability, and scalability in large or dynamic networks, and use these criteria to identify and recommend suitable candidates. Finally, applications are surveyed: we provide a detailed case study of authentication and quantum key distribution (QKD), then extend the discussion to protocols beyond QKD, where the role of authentication is more complex. Our take-home message is that an authentication requirement is not an intrinsic limitation of quantum networks: as with all secure communication, each protocol relies on a particular authentication resource, and the security claim of that protocol is meaningful only once the authentication resource and its deployment assumptions are made explicit. At the same time, the existing classical and quantum literature already offers a range of quantum-secure authentication schemes, which can support different applications when carefully matched to the required functionality, assumptions, and security guarantees.