Quantum Authentication

Behzad Lari, M. Hossientabar, HASSAN HASSANABADI

Yang Li

Authentication is one of the major technologies for cyberspace assurance.To build a framework of authentication technologies in cyberspace,the paper classifies the authentication technologies as four categories,identity authentication,message authentication,hybrid authentication,and authentication for emerging applications.It also gives a systematic description of authentication requirements and of the main technologies.The paper includes both the traditional authentication and those based on quantum cryptography.By means of four quantum authentication schemes,which are the earlier research results,the correspondence between quantum authentication schemes and those traditional ones is illustrated.

Wei Wei, Hong Mei Guo

Dong-Mei Gao, Yu‐Guang Yang

Unlike the traditional one-to-one identity authentication, group identity authentication is group oriented and can authenticate all users belonging to the same group. In this paper, we propose a dynamic quantum-group authentication protocol. Using a special entangled state, i.e., the starlike cluster state, the quantum identity authentication center in a group can authenticate all users belonging to the same group. In addition, the protocol has the following characteristics. (1) The number of users participating in group authentication can change dynamically, i.e., new users are allowed to join group authentication, and the old users are allowed to exit group authentication. (2) When new users join or old users exit group authentication, the authentication keys of all the old users do not need to be redistributed. Compared with the existing quantum-group authentication protocols, the proposed protocol is more flexible and suitable in practical scenarios.

Cheng-An Yen, Shi‐Jinn Horng, Hsi‐Sheng Goan +2 more

In this paper, we first point out that some recently proposed quantum direct communication (QDC) protocols with authentication are vulnerable under some specific attacks, and the secrete message will leak out to the authenticator who is introduced to authenticate users participating in the communication. We then propose a new protocol that is capable of achieving secure QDC with authentication as long as the authenticator would do the authentication job faithfully. Our quantum protocol introduces a mutual authentication procedure, uses the quantum Bell states, and applies unitary transformations in the authentication process. Then it exploits and utilizes the entanglement swapping and local unitary operations in the communication processes. Thus, after the authentication process, the client users are left alone to communicate with each other, and the authenticator has no access to the secrete message. In addition, our protocol does not require a direct quantum link between any two users, who want to communicate with each other. This may also be an appealing advantage in the implementation of a practical quantum communication network.

Hazel Murray, David Malone