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Multi-Party Cryptographic Key Distribution Protocol over a Public Network Based on a Quick-Response Code

Wen-Kai Yu, Ying Yang, Yaxin Li, Ning Wei, Shuo-Fei Wang

Published May 25, 2022• 7 citations

Abstract

In existing cryptographic key distribution (CKD) protocols based on computational ghost imaging (CGI), the interaction among multiple legitimate users is generally neglected, and the channel noise has a serious impact on the performance. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a multi-party interactive CKD protocol over a public network, which takes advantage of the cascade ablation of fragment patterns (FPs). The server splits a quick-response (QR) code image into multiple FPs and embeds different "watermark" labels into these FPs. By using a CGI setup, the server will acquire a series of bucket value sequences with respect to different FPs and send them to multiple legitimate users through a public network. The users reconstruct the FPs and determine whether there is an attack in the public channel according to the content of the recovered "watermark" labels, so as to complete the self-authentication. Finally, these users can extract their cryptographic keys by scanning the QR code (the cascade ablation result of FPs) returned by an intermediary. Both simulation and experimental results have verified the feasibility of this protocol. The impacts of different attacks and the noise robustness have also been investigated.

DOI: 10.3390/s22113994

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In the existing ghost-imaging-based cryptographic key distribution (GCKD) protocols, the cryptographic keys need to be encoded by using many modulated patterns, which undoubtedly incurs long measurement time and huge memory consumption. Given this, based on snapshot compressive ghost imaging, a public network cryptographic key distribution protocol is proposed, where the cryptographic keys and joint authentication information are encrypted into several color block diagrams to guarantee security. It transforms the previous single-pixel sequential multiple measurements into multi-pixel single exposure measurements, significantly reducing sampling time and memory storage. Both simulation and experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of this protocol and its ability to detect illegal attacks. Therefore, it takes GCKD a big step closer to practical applications.

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