18,509 research outputs found
Quantum ciphertext authentication and key recycling with the trap code
We investigate quantum authentication schemes constructed from quantum error-correcting codes. We show that if the code has a property called purity testing, then the resulting authentication scheme guarantees the integrity of ciphertexts, not just plaintexts. On top of that, if the code is strong purity testing, the authentication scheme also allows the encryption key to be recycled, partially even if the authentication rejects. Such a strong notion of authentication is useful in a setting where multiple ciphertexts can be present simultaneously, such as in interactive or delegated quantum computation. With these settings in mind, we give an explicit code (based on the trap code) that is strong purity testing but, contrary to other known strong-purity-testing codes, allows for natural computation on ciphertexts
Authentication of Quantum Messages
Authentication is a well-studied area of classical cryptography: a sender S
and a receiver R sharing a classical private key want to exchange a classical
message with the guarantee that the message has not been modified by any third
party with control of the communication line. In this paper we define and
investigate the authentication of messages composed of quantum states. Assuming
S and R have access to an insecure quantum channel and share a private,
classical random key, we provide a non-interactive scheme that enables S both
to encrypt and to authenticate (with unconditional security) an m qubit message
by encoding it into m+s qubits, where the failure probability decreases
exponentially in the security parameter s. The classical private key is 2m+O(s)
bits. To achieve this, we give a highly efficient protocol for testing the
purity of shared EPR pairs. We also show that any scheme to authenticate
quantum messages must also encrypt them. (In contrast, one can authenticate a
classical message while leaving it publicly readable.) This has two important
consequences: On one hand, it allows us to give a lower bound of 2m key bits
for authenticating m qubits, which makes our protocol asymptotically optimal.
On the other hand, we use it to show that digitally signing quantum states is
impossible, even with only computational security.Comment: 22 pages, LaTeX, uses amssymb, latexsym, time
Securing Interactive Sessions Using Mobile Device through Visual Channel and Visual Inspection
Communication channel established from a display to a device's camera is
known as visual channel, and it is helpful in securing key exchange protocol.
In this paper, we study how visual channel can be exploited by a network
terminal and mobile device to jointly verify information in an interactive
session, and how such information can be jointly presented in a user-friendly
manner, taking into account that the mobile device can only capture and display
a small region, and the user may only want to authenticate selective
regions-of-interests. Motivated by applications in Kiosk computing and
multi-factor authentication, we consider three security models: (1) the mobile
device is trusted, (2) at most one of the terminal or the mobile device is
dishonest, and (3) both the terminal and device are dishonest but they do not
collude or communicate. We give two protocols and investigate them under the
abovementioned models. We point out a form of replay attack that renders some
other straightforward implementations cumbersome to use. To enhance
user-friendliness, we propose a solution using visual cues embedded into the 2D
barcodes and incorporate the framework of "augmented reality" for easy
verifications through visual inspection. We give a proof-of-concept
implementation to show that our scheme is feasible in practice.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure
Approximate Quantum Error-Correcting Codes and Secret Sharing Schemes
It is a standard result in the theory of quantum error-correcting codes that
no code of length n can fix more than n/4 arbitrary errors, regardless of the
dimension of the coding and encoded Hilbert spaces. However, this bound only
applies to codes which recover the message exactly. Naively, one might expect
that correcting errors to very high fidelity would only allow small violations
of this bound. This intuition is incorrect: in this paper we describe quantum
error-correcting codes capable of correcting up to (n-1)/2 arbitrary errors
with fidelity exponentially close to 1, at the price of increasing the size of
the registers (i.e., the coding alphabet). This demonstrates a sharp
distinction between exact and approximate quantum error correction. The codes
have the property that any components reveal no information about the
message, and so they can also be viewed as error-tolerant secret sharing
schemes.
The construction has several interesting implications for cryptography and
quantum information theory. First, it suggests that secret sharing is a better
classical analogue to quantum error correction than is classical error
correction. Second, it highlights an error in a purported proof that verifiable
quantum secret sharing (VQSS) is impossible when the number of cheaters t is
n/4. More generally, the construction illustrates a difference between exact
and approximate requirements in quantum cryptography and (yet again) the
delicacy of security proofs and impossibility results in the quantum model.Comment: 14 pages, no figure
How to reuse a one-time pad and other notes on authentication, encryption and protection of quantum information
Quantum information is a valuable resource which can be encrypted in order to
protect it. We consider the size of the one-time pad that is needed to protect
quantum information in a number of cases. The situation is dramatically
different from the classical case: we prove that one can recycle the one-time
pad without compromising security. The protocol for recycling relies on
detecting whether eavesdropping has occurred, and further relies on the fact
that information contained in the encrypted quantum state cannot be fully
accessed. We prove the security of recycling rates when authentication of
quantum states is accepted, and when it is rejected. We note that recycling
schemes respect a general law of cryptography which we prove relating the size
of private keys, sent qubits, and encrypted messages. We discuss applications
for encryption of quantum information in light of the resources needed for
teleportation. Potential uses include the protection of resources such as
entanglement and the memory of quantum computers. We also introduce another
application: encrypted secret sharing and find that one can even reuse the
private key that is used to encrypt a classical message. In a number of cases,
one finds that the amount of private key needed for authentication or
protection is smaller than in the general case.Comment: 13 pages, improved rate of recycling proved in the case of rejection
of authenticatio
Keyword-Based Delegable Proofs of Storage
Cloud users (clients) with limited storage capacity at their end can
outsource bulk data to the cloud storage server. A client can later access her
data by downloading the required data files. However, a large fraction of the
data files the client outsources to the server is often archival in nature that
the client uses for backup purposes and accesses less frequently. An untrusted
server can thus delete some of these archival data files in order to save some
space (and allocate the same to other clients) without being detected by the
client (data owner). Proofs of storage enable the client to audit her data
files uploaded to the server in order to ensure the integrity of those files.
In this work, we introduce one type of (selective) proofs of storage that we
call keyword-based delegable proofs of storage, where the client wants to audit
all her data files containing a specific keyword (e.g., "important"). Moreover,
it satisfies the notion of public verifiability where the client can delegate
the auditing task to a third-party auditor who audits the set of files
corresponding to the keyword on behalf of the client. We formally define the
security of a keyword-based delegable proof-of-storage protocol. We construct
such a protocol based on an existing proof-of-storage scheme and analyze the
security of our protocol. We argue that the techniques we use can be applied
atop any existing publicly verifiable proof-of-storage scheme for static data.
Finally, we discuss the efficiency of our construction.Comment: A preliminary version of this work has been published in
International Conference on Information Security Practice and Experience
(ISPEC 2018
Universal blind quantum computation
We present a protocol which allows a client to have a server carry out a
quantum computation for her such that the client's inputs, outputs and
computation remain perfectly private, and where she does not require any
quantum computational power or memory. The client only needs to be able to
prepare single qubits randomly chosen from a finite set and send them to the
server, who has the balance of the required quantum computational resources.
Our protocol is interactive: after the initial preparation of quantum states,
the client and server use two-way classical communication which enables the
client to drive the computation, giving single-qubit measurement instructions
to the server, depending on previous measurement outcomes. Our protocol works
for inputs and outputs that are either classical or quantum. We give an
authentication protocol that allows the client to detect an interfering server;
our scheme can also be made fault-tolerant.
We also generalize our result to the setting of a purely classical client who
communicates classically with two non-communicating entangled servers, in order
to perform a blind quantum computation. By incorporating the authentication
protocol, we show that any problem in BQP has an entangled two-prover
interactive proof with a purely classical verifier.
Our protocol is the first universal scheme which detects a cheating server,
as well as the first protocol which does not require any quantum computation
whatsoever on the client's side. The novelty of our approach is in using the
unique features of measurement-based quantum computing which allows us to
clearly distinguish between the quantum and classical aspects of a quantum
computation.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures. This version contains detailed proofs of
authentication and fault tolerance. It also contains protocols for quantum
inputs and outputs and appendices not available in the published versio
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