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International Conference on Networking and Advanced Systems (ICNAS)

A Taxonomy of QKA Protocols Based on the BB84

Youssouf Achouri, Rima Djellab, Khaled Hamouid

Published Oct 21, 2023• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

In Quantum Key Agreement (QKA) protocol, two or more participants agree to share a quantum key. Participants must meet the following conditions: (1) Can be toggled per participant. Important decisions are not made by individual participants. (2) Only participants can access the key, which is not viewable by non-participants while unauthorized acquisition of keys is impossible. Key agreement protocols are used to generate cryptographic keys in many modern applications such as IoT applications, healthcare systems, vehicle communications, intelligent networks, satellite communications, and cloud applications. To resist quantum attacks, several security protocols based on quantum physics principles have been proposed to address various security issues. The main goal of this research is to provide fundamental background information along with a detailed analysis of the theoretical aspects of QKA. The emphasis is particularly on various kinds of multiparty quantum key agreement protocols considering their design and effectiveness, with a specific spotlight on the utilization of the BB84 protocol.

DOI
10.1109/icnas59892.2023.10330535

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In Quantum Key Agreement (QKA) protocol, two or more participants agree to share a quantum key. Participants must meet the following conditions: (1) Can be toggled per participant. Important decisions are not made by individual participants. (2) Only participants can access the key, which is not viewable by non-participants while unauthorized acquisition of keys is impossible. Key agreement protocols are used to generate cryptographic keys in many modern applications such as IoT applications, healthcare systems, vehicle communications, intelligent networks, satellite communications, and cloud applications. To resist quantum attacks, several security protocols based on quantum physics principles have been proposed to address various security issues. The main goal of this research is to provide fundamental background information along with a detailed analysis of the theoretical aspects of QKA. The emphasis is particularly on various kinds of multiparty quantum key agreement protocols considering their design and effectiveness, with a specific spotlight on the utilization of the BB84 protocol.
Abstract Quantum Key Agreement (QKA) is a current research topic within quantum cryptography where two or more parties collaboratively generate a shared secret key, commonly without individual full control of it. This work proposes a QKA method involving a third party other than the transmitter and receiver. Based on an initial BB84 procedure as in the EBB84 protocol, participants create an indefinite key, which becomes strong against multiple intercept-resend attacks. The process does not need decoy photons as in many other QKA protocols. Security improvements against eavesdropping are observed as compared with the BB84 protocol. The proposal could be designed to reach eavesdropping failure probabilities of 5 16 on average and fidelities lower than 1 4 for the modified state during the attack. The simplicity of the proposed protocol allows its implementation for more than two participants with current technology for the protection of information. Overall, it gives an understanding of the process used to share secured information between several parties without a previous agreement.
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In this paper, we exhibit a practical quantum key agreement (QKA) protocol and give an analysis of its security. More precisely, we employ the hash function to prevent participants from cheating, so as to achieve the purpose of determining the key fairly by both participants. Our protocol is therefore computationally secure against internal attacks while still providing unconditional security against eavesdropping attacks. The quantum part of our protocol is similar to BB84, so it is simple to implement and has a wide range of applications.
Quantum Key Agreement (QKA) signifies that two or more participants together generate a key and QKA has to satisfy the following conditions: (1) Every participant can change the key and the key is not decided by any participant individually. (2) Only participants can know the key, nonparticipants cannot get the key through illegal means. Because of the conditions of participating together, it makes transport inefficient in the current mainstream protocols. They use unicast to exchange messages one by one, so it will considerably limit transmission efficiency and increase cost time spent. This study proposes a protocol based on Multiparty Quantum Secret Direct Communication (MQSDC) with multicast. In addition to satisfying the above conditions, it uses multicast to not only achieve the effect and purpose of QKA, but also to defend against internal and external attacks at the same time. In regard to resource consumption, this study involves linear growth and is more efficient than other mainstream protocols which employ exponential growth.
Quantum key agreement (QKA) is an important quantum cryptography primitive. In a QKA protocol, two or more untrusted parties can agree on an identical key in such a way that they equally influence the key and no subset can decide it alone. However, in practical QKA, the imperfections of the participant’s detectors can be exploited to compromise the security and fairness of QKA. To remove all the detector-side-channel loopholes, a measurement-device-independent multi-party QKA protocol is proposed. The protocol exploits the post-selected GHZ states to generate a secure agreement key between legitimate participants, while ensuring the fairness of key agreement. Our protocol provides a new clue for the design of practical QKA protocols.
The fairness of a secure multi-party quantum key agreement (MQKA) protocol requires that all involved parties are entirely peer entities and can equally influence the outcome of the protocol to establish a shared key wherein no one can decide the shared key alone. However, it is found that parts of the existing MQKA protocols are sensitive to collusion attacks, i.e., some of the dishonest participants can collaborate to predetermine the final key without being detected. In this paper, a multi-party QKA protocol resisting collusion attacks is proposed. Different from previous QKA protocol resisting N−1N-1N−1 coconspirators or resisting 111 coconspirators, we investigate the general circle-type MQKA protocol which can be secure against ttt dishonest participants' cooperation. Here, t<Nt < Nt<N. We hope the results of the presented paper will be helpful for further research on fair MQKA protocols.