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AIP conference proceedings

An efficient modification to the ping-pong protocol to enhance the security

Hargeet Kaur, Kavit Shah

Published Jan 1, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Ping-Pong protocol is a Quantum Secure Direct Communication protocol that fails to transfer a secure key or secret message optimally in a lossy or noisy channel. The reason is an eavesdropper who possibly hides in the light of these channel losses and gains information about the secure key bits or secret messages. We propose an efficient modification to the control mode of the original Ping-Pong protocol leading to the detection of an eavesdropper with a much higher probability which may not allow her to hide in the light of lossy channels. Assuming that Eve knows and makes a fixed number of right guesses about the modification in the protocol, an optimum ratio of modification can be evaluated. In addition, it is shown that incorporation of the proposed modification in the protocol doubles the eavesdropper’s detection probability for certain eavesdropping operations.

DOI
10.1063/5.0182608

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Ping-Pong protocol is a Quantum Secure Direct Communication protocol that fails to transfer a secure key or secret message optimally in a lossy or noisy channel. The reason is an eavesdropper who possibly hides in the light of these channel losses and gains information about the secure key bits or secret messages. We propose an efficient modification to the control mode of the original Ping-Pong protocol leading to the detection of an eavesdropper with a much higher probability which may not allow her to hide in the light of lossy channels. Assuming that Eve knows and makes a fixed number of right guesses about the modification in the protocol, an optimum ratio of modification can be evaluated. In addition, it is shown that incorporation of the proposed modification in the protocol doubles the eavesdropper’s detection probability for certain eavesdropping operations.
Security of the "ping-pong" quantum communication protocol recently proposed by Boström and Felbinger [Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 187902 (2002)]] is analyzed in the case of considerable quantum channel losses. The eavesdropping scheme is presented, which reveals that the ping-pong protocol is not secure for transmission efficiencies lower than 60%. Our scheme induces 50% losses, which, however, can be hidden in the channel losses if one replaces the original lossy channel with a less lossy one. Finally, a possible improvement of the ping-pong protocol security is proposed.
A security layer for the asymptotically secure ping-pong protocol is proposed and analyzed in the paper. The operation of the improvement exploits inevitable errors introduced by the eavesdropping in the control and message modes. Its role is similar to the privacy amplification algorithms known from the quantum key distribution schemes. Messages are processed in blocks which guarantees that an eavesdropper is faced with a computationally infeasible problem as long as the system parameters are within reasonable limits. The introduced additional information preprocessing does not require quantum memory registers and confidential communication is possible without prior key agreement or some shared secret.
A modified version of the well known ping-pong protocol is proposed and analyzed in the paper. The operation of the improved version exploits inevitable errors introduced by the eavesdropping in the message mode — a feature which has not been exploited so far. A proposed protocol improvement is in its role similar to the privacy amplification known from the quantum key distribution schemes, but no randomization of transferred information is introduced and deterministic character of communication is preserved. Messages are processed in blocks which guarantees that an eavesdropper is faced with a computationally infeasible problem as long as the system parameters are within reasonable limits. Information processing does not require quantum memory registers and confidential communication is possible without prior key agreement or some shared secret.
The quantum secure direct communication is a new-style quantum communication scheme. It arouses much interest recently. The ping-pong protocol proposed by Bostroem and Felbinger is one of relatively mature quantum secure direct communication protocols, which is asymptotically secure under Eve's eavesdropping attack. But it ignores the message authentication. Being aimed at this problem, we propose a novel ping-pong protocol with authentication. The former has two operation modes, or the message mode and the control mode, which are used to send message and detect Eve's attack, respectively. But it just detects Eve's eavesdropping attack and does not authenticate the sent message in the control mode. The latter has also the above two operation modes, which employs a braid-based key agreement protocol for both the parties participating in communication to share a secret, whose size and magnitude are undecided in advance. Using the shared secret, it not only detects Eve's eavesdropping attack, but also effectively performs the message authentication in the control mode. It is also asymptotically secure under Eve's eavesdropping attack. The security of the proposed protocol is based on the no-cloning theorem, the correlations of quantum entanglement and the fact that the p-th root finding problem on braid groups is intractable even on quantum computers, as well as classical computers. In addition different from the original ping-pong protocol, the communication was initiated by the sender Alice instead of by the receiver Bob. This corresponds to the way of common communications. The present protocol not only can resist the attacks known recently, but should be experimentally feasible using today's technology.
We introduce an attack scheme for eavesdropping freely the ping-pong quantum communication protocol proposed by Boström and Felbinger [ Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 , 187902 (2002)] in a noise channel. The vicious eavesdropper, Eve, intercepts and measures the travel photon transmitted between the sender and the receiver. Then she replaces the quantum signal with a multi-photon signal in the same state, and measures the returned photons with the measuring basis, with which Eve prepares the fake signal except for one photon. This attack increases neither the quantum channel losses nor the error rate in the sampling instances for eavesdropping check. It works for eavesdropping the secret message transmitted with the ping-pong protocol. Finally, we propose a way for improving the security of the ping-pong protocol.
The "Ping-Pong" (PP) protocol is a two-way quantum key protocol based on entanglement. In this protocol, Bob prepares one maximally entangled pair of qubits, and sends one qubit to Alice. Then, Alice performs some necessary operations on this qubit and sends it back to Bob. Although this protocol was proposed in 2002, its security in the noisy and lossy channel has not been proven. In this report, we add a simple and experimentally feasible modification to the original PP protocol, and prove the security of this modified PP protocol against collective attacks when the noisy and lossy channel is taken into account. Simulation results show that our protocol is practical.