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Lecture notes in computer science

Field-Tested Authentication for Quantum Key Distribution and DoS Attacks

Antoine Gansel, Juliane Krämer, Tim Schumacher, Patrick Struck, Maximilian Tippmann, Thomas Walther

Published Oct 22, 2025• 1 citation
Publisher
DOI
10.1007/978-3-032-01799-4_14

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In this article, we investigate the issue of authenticating the classical post-processing components of a QKD protocol through an insecure channel. Our analysis starts with state-of-the-art solutions and subsequently introduces an authentication scheme aiming at both Information Theoretic Security and resiliency from particular denial-of-service attacks targeting the authentication procedure. The proposed strategy combines -Almost Strongly Universal hashing for unconditional protection and computationally-secure Message Authentication Codes for DoS detection capability. Specifically, we consider the protocol security in a typical QKD scenario, taking into account partially weak authentication keys. Moreover, we add practical considerations related to authentication parameters and experimentally evaluate the performance of the proposed system in terms of computational complexity and key consumption in a reasonable use case.
Hirose and Yoshida proposed an authenticated key agreement protocol based on the intractability of the Computational Diffie-Hellman problem. Recently, Hirose and Matsuura pointed out that Hirose and Yoshida's protocol is vulnerable to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. And they proposed two key agreement protocols which are resistant to the DoS attacks. Their protocols are the first authenticated key agreement protocols resistant to both the storage exhaustion attack and the CPU exhaustion attack. In this paper we show that Hirose and Matsuura's DoS-resistant key agreement protocols and Hirose and Yoshida's key agreement protocol are vulnerable to impersonation attacks. We make suggestions for improvements.
With the development of quantum computers, traditional cryptographic systems are facing more and more serious security threats. Fortunately, quantum key distribution (QKD) and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) are two cryptographic mechanisms with quantum-resistant security, and both will become important solutions for future information security. However, neither of them is perfect, and they are complementary. Quantum key distribution has unconditional security that post-quantum cryptography does not have, and PQC can provide secure and convenient authentication for QKD networks. In this paper, we propose two protocols based on PQC to realize the full authentication of the QKD data post-processing, and we only need to assume the short-term security of PQC algorithm to ensure the long-term quantum resistant security of distributed keys. We found that for the above two authentication protocols, attackers cannot successfully implement replay attacks. These authentication protocols can solve the problems of the current pre-shared key authentication in the application of large-scale quantum key distribution networks, and are expected to realize a key distribution mechanism with practical operability and quantum resistant security, which will be beneficial to promote the deployment and application of quantum key distribution networks.