Improvement of modified authenticated key agreement protocol

Recently, Ku and Wang showed that Tseng’s modified authenticated key agreement protocol is vulnerable to two attacks and proposed an improvement to withstand these attacks. However, this letter will show that this improvement is still vulnerable to the modification attack, which is contrary to their claims. Additionally, we proposed an improvement to eliminate this security flaw

Semi-quantum communication: Protocols for key agreement, controlled secure direct communication and dialogue

Semi-quantum protocols that allow some of the users to remain classical are proposed for a large class of problems associated with secure communication and secure multiparty computation. Specifically, first time semi-quantum protocols are proposed for key agreement, controlled deterministic secure communication and dialogue, and it is shown that the semi-quantum protocols for controlled deterministic secure communication and dialogue can be reduced to semi-quantum protocols for e-commerce and private comparison (socialist millionaire problem), respectively. Complementing with the earlier proposed semi-quantum schemes for key distribution, secret sharing and deterministic secure communication, set of schemes proposed here and subsequent discussions have established that almost every secure communication and computation tasks that can be performed using fully quantum protocols can also be performed in semi-quantum manner. Further, it addresses a fundamental question in context of a large number problems- how much quantumness is (how many quantum parties are) required to perform a specific secure communication task? Some of the proposed schemes are completely orthogonal-state-based, and thus, fundamentally different from the existing semi-quantum schemes that are conjugate-coding-based. Security, efficiency and applicability of the proposed schemes have been discussed with appropriate importance.Comment: 19 pages 1 figur

Quantum e-commerce: A comparative study of possible protocols for online shopping and other tasks related to e-commerce

A set of quantum protocols for online shopping is proposed and analyzed to establish that it is possible to perform secure online shopping using different types of quantum resources. Specifically, a single photon based, a Bell state based and two 3-qubit entangled state based quantum online shopping schemes are proposed. The Bell state based scheme, being a completely orthogonal state based protocol, is fundamentally different from the earlier proposed schemes which were based on conjugate coding. One of the 3-qubit entangled state based scheme is build on the principle of entanglement swapping which enables us to accomplish the task without transmission of the message encoded qubits through the channel. Possible ways of generalizing the entangled state based schemes proposed here to the schemes which use multiqubit entangled states is also discussed. Further, all the proposed protocols are shown to be free from the limitations of the recently proposed protocol of Huang et al. (Quantum Inf. Process. 14, 2211-2225, 2015) which allows the buyer (Alice) to change her order at a later time (after initially placing the order and getting it authenticated by the controller). The proposed schemes are also compared with the existing schemes using qubit efficiency.Comment: It's shown that quantum e-commerce is not a difficult task, and it can be done in various way

Orthogonal-state-based protocols of quantum key agreement

Two orthogonal-state-based protocols of quantum key agreement (QKA) are proposed. The first protocol of QKA proposed here is designed for two-party QKA, whereas the second protocol is designed for multi-party QKA. Security of these orthogonal-state-based protocols arise from monogamy of entanglement. This is in contrast to the existing protocols of QKA where security arises from the use of non-orthogonal state (non-commutativity principle). Further, it is shown that all the quantum systems that are useful for implementation of quantum dialogue and most of the protocols of secure direct quantum communication can be modified to implement protocols of QKA.Comment: 9 pages, no figur

Secure Key Exchange Against Man-in-the-Middle Attack: Modified Diffie-Hellman Protocol

One of the most famous key exchange protocols is Diffie-Hellman Protocol (DHP) which is a widely used technique on which key exchange systems around the world depend. This protocol is simple and uncomplicated, and its robustness is based on the Discrete Logarithm Problem (DLP). Despite this, he is considered weak against the man-in-the-middle attack. This article presents a completely different version of the DHP protocol. The proposed version is based on two verification stages. In the first step, we check if the pseudo-random value α that Alice sends to Bob has been manipulated! In the second step, we make sure that the random value β that Bob sends to Alice is not manipulated. The man-in-the-middle attacker Eve can impersonate neither Alice nor Bob, manipulate their exchanged values, or discover the secret encryption key

Attacks on quantum key distribution protocols that employ non-ITS authentication

We demonstrate how adversaries with unbounded computing resources can break Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocols which employ a particular message authentication code suggested previously. This authentication code, featuring low key consumption, is not Information-Theoretically Secure (ITS) since for each message the eavesdropper has intercepted she is able to send a different message from a set of messages that she can calculate by finding collisions of a cryptographic hash function. However, when this authentication code was introduced it was shown to prevent straightforward Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks against QKD protocols. In this paper, we prove that the set of messages that collide with any given message under this authentication code contains with high probability a message that has small Hamming distance to any other given message. Based on this fact we present extended MITM attacks against different versions of BB84 QKD protocols using the addressed authentication code; for three protocols we describe every single action taken by the adversary. For all protocols the adversary can obtain complete knowledge of the key, and for most protocols her success probability in doing so approaches unity. Since the attacks work against all authentication methods which allow to calculate colliding messages, the underlying building blocks of the presented attacks expose the potential pitfalls arising as a consequence of non-ITS authentication in QKD-postprocessing. We propose countermeasures, increasing the eavesdroppers demand for computational power, and also prove necessary and sufficient conditions for upgrading the discussed authentication code to the ITS level.Comment: 34 page