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IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering

Three-Party Controlled Authentication Semiquantum Key Agreement Protocol for Online Joint Consultation

XiYuan Liang, Yefeng He, Yichi Zhang, JiaQiang Fan

Published Jan 1, 2025• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In Wise Information Technology of Medicine, to ensure both confidentiality and integrity of the data created during online joint consultations, and to solve the problem that ordinary users cannot afford expensive quantum devices and are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks during communication, this paper proposes a three-party controlled authentication semi-quantum key agreement protocol, leveraging the measurement retransmission operation and the entanglement properties of Cluster states. With the help of a trusted controller with full quantum capabilities, the identities of three semi-quantum parties are authenticated, and a shared key is negotiated fairly for subsequent communication. Since the semi-quantum participants only need to perform simple quantum state preparation, measurement and reflection operations, the protocol reduces the requirements for participants' capabilities and equipment. Moreover, the protocol prevents man-in-the-middle attacks by authenticating the identity of participants. The security evaluation demonstrates that the protocol is capable of effectively defending against both internal participant threats and external intrusions. Moreover, a comparison with existing semi-quantum key agreement protocols reveals that this protocol offers certain advantages when its functionality and performance are comprehensively evaluated.

DOI
10.1109/tqe.2025.3568865

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In Wise Information Technology of Medicine, to ensure both confidentiality and integrity of the data created during online joint consultations, and to solve the problem that ordinary users cannot afford expensive quantum devices and are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks during communication, this paper proposes a three-party controlled authentication semi-quantum key agreement protocol, leveraging the measurement retransmission operation and the entanglement properties of Cluster states. With the help of a trusted controller with full quantum capabilities, the identities of three semi-quantum parties are authenticated, and a shared key is negotiated fairly for subsequent communication. Since the semi-quantum participants only need to perform simple quantum state preparation, measurement and reflection operations, the protocol reduces the requirements for participants' capabilities and equipment. Moreover, the protocol prevents man-in-the-middle attacks by authenticating the identity of participants. The security evaluation demonstrates that the protocol is capable of effectively defending against both internal participant threats and external intrusions. Moreover, a comparison with existing semi-quantum key agreement protocols reveals that this protocol offers certain advantages when its functionality and performance are comprehensively evaluated.
In the field of smart healthcare, video consultation has become a key way to provide medical services for remote patients. In this process, it is essential to ensure the legal identity of both parties to the communication and to protect patient privacy data from unlawful interception and tampering. Therefore, a controlled quantum authentication confidential communication protocol is proposed by using the entanglement exchange ability and measurement correlation of Bell states. With the assistance of a trusted third party, the protocol first achieves the mutual authentication of the communication parties, so as to prevent malicious users from communicating by pretending to be medical specialists or patients. The trusted party then further assists the communicating parties in generating two implicit shared keys, which they use to encrypt the message and its digest, ensuring that the patient's sensitive data is not intercepted or tampered with. In addition, the quantum sequences are transmitted only once in the channel, reducing the loss and noise effects caused by multiple transmissions. Security analysis shows that the protocol can effectively resist participant attacks and outside attacks. In addition, performance analysis provides computation in terms of qubit efficiency and experimental simulation results of the protocol.
Abstract In the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), sensors automatically collect data and transmit it to hospital servers, where doctors provide professional medical advice. The emergence of IoMT has significantly reduced the burden on chronic-disease patients and improved their life security. However, the transmission of patients’ medical data still faces serious confidentiality and integrity risks. This paper proposes a novel healthcare-system architecture that integrates a controlled-authentication semi-quantum key-negotiation (SQKN) protocol, leveraging the unconditional security of quantum cryptography to mitigate potential data attacks. The hospital server acts as a trusted controller that supervises every protocol run and authenticates all participants, which effectively thwarts man-in-the-middle and identity-spoofing attacks. The semi-quantum design further minimizes the quantum-device burden on patients’ side. Experimental simulation under realistic noise (QBER ≈ 0.03 at 0.02/0.04 noise level, 3 000 shots) shows the protocol keeps the quantum-bit error rate below 3 %, while the overall key-generation efficiency reaches 92 %, demonstrating that the scheme resists known attacks and maintains high quantum efficiency for safeguarding IoMT data security.
Abstract Quantum key agreement (QKA) is an important cryptographic primitive that plays a pivotal role in private communications. Authenticated QKA plays an important role in QKA. In this paper, we propose an authenticated multiparty QKA scheme based on 4-qubit cluster states entanglement swapping. The scheme is divided into two parts, the first part is the quantum identity authentication stage, and the second part is the QKA stage. In the quantum identity authentication stage, the participants determine that the participant communicating with them is the claimed person through mutual authentication, which can avoid the impersonation attack of the eavesdropper Eve. In the QKA phase, the participants adopt a bidirectional transmission structure with the participation of a semi-trusted third party, and based on the entanglement swapping property of the 4-qubit cluster state, the QKA is finally realized. Detailed security analysis shows that the protocol can resist a variety of internal and external attacks, such as participants attack, entangle-measure attack, and so on.
Abstract The semi-quantum key agreement (SQKA) protocol enables classical participants to complete key agreement with limited quantum capabilities. The previous semi-quantum key agreement protocols required the classical party to have the ability to measure qubits, and share a key before the protocol began. This paper proposes a SQKA protocol that allows semi-quantum participants to use single photons for key negotiation with the help of a semi-honest third party (TP). Unlike previous approaches, this protocol further reduces the quantum capability requirements for participants and eliminates the need for prior key sharing. Furthermore, through security analysis and multi-party expansion, the protocol can resist external attacks such as the intercept-resend attack, measure-resend attack, entangle-measure attack. Additionally, it can be applied to scenarios involving different numbers of participants.
In order to make the quantum key agreement process immune to participant attacks, it is necessary to introduce the authentication in the communication process. A quantum key agreement protocol with identity authentication that exploits the measurement correlation of six-particle entangled states is proposed. In contrast to some recently proposed quantum key agreement protocols with authentication, this protocol requires neither a semi-trusted third party nor additional private keys in the authentication process. The entire process of authentication and key agreement can be achieved using only n six-particle entangled states, which saves communication costs and reduces the complexity of the authentication process. Finally, security analysis shows that this scheme is resistant to some important attacks.
Quantum key agreement (QKA) can generate a shared secret key which is equally negotiated by all the participants in the protocol. In most of the QKA protocols, all the participants require quantum capabilities. But the quantum devices are too expensive for participants. This paper proposes a mutual semi-quantum key agreement protocol which allows two parties (Alice and Bob) to negotiate a shared secret key equally. In the protocol, Alice can perform any quantum operation, but Bob is a classical participant which can only perform reflection, measurement and reorder operation. Even though Bob has fewer quantum resources, Alice and Bob have an equal contribution to the shared final key, no one can determine the shared key alone. In addition, we demonstrate the security of the proposed protocol. The analysis results show that the proposed protocol not only resists against some common attacks but also assures the fairness property. It is significant for communication participant without enough quantum devices to achieve quantum communication. The proposed protocol can be implemented with present quantum technologies.