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Photonics

Quantum Secure Multi-Party Summation with Identity Authentication Based on Commutative Encryption

Ning Wang, Xinying Tian, Xiaodong Zhang, Song Lin

Published May 10, 2023• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In quantum secure multi-party summation protocols, some attackers can impersonate legitimate participants in the summation process, and easily steal the summation results from the participants. This is often overlooked for existing secure multi-party summation protocols, thus rendering them insecure. Based on commutative encryption, a quantum secure multi-party summation protocol with identity authentication is proposed in this paper. In the protocol, each participant encodes a secret integer on photons via unitary operations. At the same time, a one-way hash function technique with a key is utilized to perform identity authentication operations for each participant. Finally, the summation is calculated with the help of a semi-trusted third party. The analysis of the protocol shows that the proposed protocol is correct and resistant to common and impersonation attacks. Compared to related protocols, the use and measurement of single photons makes the protocol easier to implement into existing technology. Furthermore, the simulation experiments on the IBM Q Experience cloud platform demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented protocol.

DOI
10.3390/photonics10050558

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In quantum secure multi-party summation protocols, some attackers can impersonate legitimate participants in the summation process, and easily steal the summation results from the participants. This is often overlooked for existing secure multi-party summation protocols, thus rendering them insecure. Based on commutative encryption, a quantum secure multi-party summation protocol with identity authentication is proposed in this paper. In the protocol, each participant encodes a secret integer on photons via unitary operations. At the same time, a one-way hash function technique with a key is utilized to perform identity authentication operations for each participant. Finally, the summation is calculated with the help of a semi-trusted third party. The analysis of the protocol shows that the proposed protocol is correct and resistant to common and impersonation attacks. Compared to related protocols, the use and measurement of single photons makes the protocol easier to implement into existing technology. Furthermore, the simulation experiments on the IBM Q Experience cloud platform demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented protocol.
Secure multi-party computation has been playing a fundamental role in terms of classical cryptography. Quantum homomorphic encryption (QHE) could compute the encrypted data without decryption. At present, most protocols use a semi-honest third party (TP) to protect participants’ secrets. We use a quantum homomorphic encryption scheme instead of TP to protect the privacy of parties. Based on quantum homomorphic encryption, a secure multi-party quantum summation scheme is proposed in which N participants can delegate a server with strong quantum computing power to assist computation. By delegating the computation and key update processes to a server and a semi-honest key center, participants encrypt their private information data using Pauli operators to get the sum. Besides, the server can design and optimize the summation lines itself, and the correct results can be obtained even if the secret information is negative. The correctness analysis showed that the participants could correctly obtain the results of the calculation. The security analysis proves the scheme is resistant to both outside attack and participant’s attack, and is secure against collusive attack by up to N-2 participants. From the theoretical point of view, our protocol can extend to other secure multi-party computing problems.
participants can simultaneously obtain the summation result without revealing their secret inputs. Our protocol uses single photon states as the information carriers. In addition, each participant with secret input only performs simple single-particle operators rather than particle preparation and any complex quantum measurements. These features make our protocol more feasible to implement. We demonstrate the correctness and security of the proposed protocol, which is resistant to participant attack and outside attack. In the end, we compare in detail the performance of the quantum summation protocol in this paper with other schemes in terms of different indicators. By comparison, our protocol is efficient and easy to implement.
As a particular area of quantum security multiparty computation, quantum secure multiparty summation plays a critical role in modern cryptography. It is widely known that most of the existing quantum summation protocols are based on an honest or semi-honest third party (TP). However, the introduced TP makes the protocol difficult to implement in practice, as it may face a single-point-of-failure attack on TP. Although some TP-free protocols are proposed to mitigate this risk, the increased cost of communication reduces its efficiency. To address these issues, a novel quantum-secure multiparty summation protocol based on a cooperative random number distribution mechanism (QMS-CRM) is proposed in this paper for the first time. During it, this mechanism is designed using Shamir’s secret sharing scheme. Furthermore, this approach eliminates the requirement for random number exchange between participants without the help of TP, enhancing the efficiency of the protocol. The security analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol can resist both external attacks and collusion attacks by up to n−2n - 2n−2 participants. Finally, we simulated the protocol on the IBM Quantum Cloud platform, confirming its feasibility.
Abstract A previous study [Entropy 25.4 (2023): 590] proposed a quantum secure multi-party summation protocol wherein n participants could obtain the modulo-2 summation result using single photons and single-particle operations. Owing to the absence of an entanglement state, this protocol was more practical than other quantum summation protocols that used entanglement properties. Thus, this study investigated the claim that this proposed protocol prevented the participants’ secret inputs from being disclosed. It was found that the previously proposed protocol was vulnerable to a quantum Trojan horse attack owing to the circular qubit transmission mode. Using a security loophole, this study proposed an attack strategy that allowed an outside attacker to steal any participant’s secret input without being detected by a third party and participants. In addition, a simulation experiment was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed attack and evaluate the number of quantum Trojan horse probes that the attacker must inject into regular qubit sequences. Finally, a solution was proposed by modifying the protocol to securely prevent quantum Trojan horse attacks.
Based on the entanglement feature of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, a multi-user quantum key distribution with mutual authentication is proposed. In the protocol, a semi-trusted third party, who may misbehave on its own but will conspire with none of the participants, is introduced to help arbitrary two users on a quantum network to achieve this secure task. Firstly, the third party prepares a three-particle entangled state. Then, he keeps one particle in his hand, and sends two particles to these two users respectively. Meanwhile, a keyed one-way hash function is utilized to generate an authentication message, in terms of which three parties respectively make an appropriate single-particle measurement on the particles in their hands. According to the measurement results, the third party can verify the identity of one user. It implies that one user is able to authenticate the other user with the assistance of the third party. After that, two participants use the remainder measurement results to generate a common session key. Moreover, the practical implementation of the presented protocol is discussed, which illustrates that this protocol is feasible under the current techniques. In the end, the security of the presented protocol is analyzed. It is shown that this protocol is secure in theory by proving that the presented protocol can stand against several common attacks.
Quantum communication networks are connected by various devices to achieve communication or distributed computing for users in remote locations. In order to solve the problem of generating temporary session key for secure communication in optical-ring quantum networks, a quantum key agreement protocol is proposed. In the key agreement protocols, an attacker can impersonate a legal user to participate in the negotiation process and eavesdrop the agreement key easily. This is often overlooked in most quantum key agreement protocols, which makes them insecure in practical implementation. Considering this problem, the function of authenticating the user’s identity is added in the proposed protocol. Combining classical hash function with identity information, we design the authentication operation conforming to the characteristics of quantum search algorithm. In the security analysis of the proposed protocol, quantum state discrimination is utilized to show that the protocol is secure against common attacks and impersonation attack. In addition, only single photons need to be prepared and measured, which makes our protocol feasible with existing technology.