Novel Multi-Party Quantum Key Agreement Protocol with G-Like States and Bell States

A significant aspect of quantum cryptography is quantum key agreement (QKA), which ensures the security of key agreement protocols by quantum information theory. The fairness of an absolute security multi-party quantum key agreement (MQKA) protocol demands that all participants can affect the protocol result equally so as to establish a shared key and that nobody can determine the shared key by himself/herself. We found that it is difficult for the existing multi-party quantum key agreement protocol to withstand the collusion attacks. Put differently, it is possible for several cooperated and untruthful participants to determine the final key without being detected. To address this issue, based on the entanglement swapping between G-like state and Bell states, a new multi-party quantum key agreement protocol is put forward. The proposed protocol makes full use of EPR pairs as quantum resources, and adopts Bell measurement and unitary operation to share a secret key. Besides, the proposed protocol is fair, secure and efficient without involving a third party quantum center. It demonstrates that the protocol is capable of protecting users’ privacy and meeting the requirement of fairness. Moreover, it is feasible to carry out the protocol with existing technologies.     

Quantum key agreement protocol based on BB84

This work presents a quantum key agreement (QKA) based on the BB84 protocol. The newly proposed QKA protocol enables two involved parties to jointly establish a shared secret key in such a way that the shared secret key cannot be fully determined by one party alone. In contrast to the traditional key agreement protocols that must be based on some mathematical difficulties, the security of the newly proposed protocol is based on the quantum phenomena, which allows unconditional security as well as detection of eavesdroppers. With the technique of delayed measurement, the proposed protocol has 50% qubit efficiency. Therefore, it is very efficient and feasible for practical applications.     

Quantum Key Agreement Against Collective Decoherence

A robust and efficient quantum key agreement (QKA) protocol is presented with decoherence-free (DF) states and single-particle measurements. Compared with all the previous QKA protocols, which are designed in ideal condition, this protocol can not only guarantee both the security and fairness of the shared key but also be immune to collective decoherence. In addition, our protocol has a high intrinsic efficiency due to the utilization of the delayed measurement technique. Finally, we show that the proposed protocol is secure against the attacks from both outside eavesdroppers and inside dishonest participants.     

New Probabilistic Quantum Key Distribution Protocol

On the basis of entanglement swapping of Bell states, Hwang et al. proposed a probabilistic quantum key distribution (PQKD) protocol Quantum Inf. Comput. 11(7-8), 615–637 (2011). Recently, Lin et al. Quantum Inf. Comput. 14(9-10), 757–762 (2014) proposed a unitary operation attack on Hwang et al.’s PQKD. However, unlike the unitary operation attack, this work points out that a malicious participant in Hwang et al.’s PQKD protocol can manipulate the secret key. As a result, the security requirements of a PQKD protocol, i.e., fairness, cannot be satisfied in their protocol. Moreover, the same attack can also crack the fairness requirement of the existing quantum key agreement (QKA) protocols. To overcome both problems, this paper proposes a new PQKD protocol based on the order rearrangement of the transmitted photons. Furthermore, the rearrangement method can also solve the key manipulation attack in QKA protocols.     

Multiparty Quantum Key Agreement with Four-Qubit Symmetric W State

Based on four-qubit symmetric W state, the delayed measurement, decoy photos method, block transmission technique and the dense coding method, a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol is proposed. By utilizing the delayed measurement and decoy photos method, the fairness and security of the protocol are ensured. That is, the final generation key can be got fairly by m participants and the outside eavesdropper (includes Trojan-horse attacks, Measure-resend attack, Intercept-resend attack and Entangle-measure attack) and the dishonest participants attacks can be resisted in this protocol. By utilizing block transmission technique and the dense coding method, the efficiency of the protocol is improved. The efficiency analysis shows that the proposed protocol is more efficient than other multi-party QKA protocols.     

Quantum Key Agreement Via Non-maximally Entangled Cluster States

International Journal of Theoretical Physics - In this paper, we present a quantum key agreement (QKA) protocol with non-maximally entangled four-qubit cluster states. In our scheme, each...     

Multi-Party Quantum Key Agreement Protocol with Bell States and Single Particles

International Journal of Theoretical Physics - Liu et al. [Quantum Inf. Process. 12, 1797–1805 (2013)] proposed a multi-party quantum key agreement (QKA) protocol based on single particles....     

Multiparty semiquantum key agreement without entanglement

The key agreement protocols allow two or more users to negotiate a shared key for establishing a secure communication channel without a third trusted party in such a way that the shared key is determined by all authorized players rather than any subset of them. We propose the first real multiparty semiquantum key agreement(SQKA) protocols based on single-photons. Our protocols include only one quantum player, while the others are classical players who only need to measure and prepare states in the classical basis. We first present a symmetric three-party SQKA protocol,where two classical players can fairly negotiate a key with a quantum player by using single-photons as message carriers. Then we present an asymmetric SQKA protocol where a relatively low percentage of quantum states are used for eavesdropping detection. And we further extend them to an asymmetric multiparty SQKA protocol. Our SQKA protocols require fewer quantum resources than the previous SQKA protocols for classical players, especially without requirement of entanglement,which makes them easier to implement using current technologies. Our protocols are secure against external eavesdroppers and are fair against a minority of internal dishonest players.     

Improvement of “Novel Multiparty Quantum Key Agreement Protocol with GHZ States”

Quantum key agreement (QKA) protocol is a method for negotiating a fair and secure key among mutually untrusted participants. Recently, Xu et al. (Quantum Inf. Process. 13:2587–2594, 2014) proposed a multi-party QKA protocol based on Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states. However, this study points out that Xu et al.’s protocol cannot provide the fairness property. That is, the last involved participant in the protocol can manipulate the final shared secret key without being detected by the other participants. Moreover, according to Yu et al.’s research (2015), Xu et al.’s protocol cannot avoid the public discussion attack too. To avoid these weaknesses, an improved QKA protocol is proposed.     

Designing Secure Quantum Key Agreement Protocols Against Dishonest Participants

Quantum key agreement (QKA) aims to negotiate a secure and consistent key among several participants. In this paper, we find that a type of QKA protocol is not secure when a participant is dishonest. He can make the honest participants obtain wrong final keys, which may lead to serious consequences. To resist such attacks, we design a defense strategy by introducing a trusted third party. The theoretical analysis results show that our defense strategy not only can detect the dishonest participant’s attacks, but also can identify who is dishonest. Finally we design an optical platform for participants, and show that both our attack and defense strategies are feasible with current technologies.

     

Improvement on “Quantum Key Agreement Protocol with Maximally Entangled States”

Recently, Hsueh and Chen [in Proceedings of the 14th Information Security Conference, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, pp. 236–242, 2004] proposed a quantum key agreement (QKA) protocol with maximally entangled states. Their protocol allows two users to negotiate a secret key in such a way that no one can predetermine the shared key alone. This study points out two security flaws in their protocol: (1) a legitimate but malicious user can fully control the shared key alone; (2) an eavesdropper can obtain the shared key without being detected. A possible solution is presented to avoid these attacks and also Tsai et al.’s CNOT attack [in Proceedings of the 20th Cryptology and Information Security Conference, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, pp. 210–213, 2010] on Hsueh and Chen protocol to obtain the shared key without being detected.     

Entanglement as a precondition for secure quantum key distribution

We demonstrate that a necessary precondition for an unconditionally secure quantum key distribution is that both sender and receiver can use the available measurement results to prove the presence of entanglement in a quantum state that is effectively distributed between them. One can thus systematically search for entanglement using the class of entanglement witness operators that can be constructed from the observed data. We apply such analysis to two well-known quantum key distribution protocols, namely, the 4-state protocol and the 6-state protocol. As a special case, we show that, for some asymmetric error patterns, the presence of entanglement can be proven even for error rates above 25% (4-state protocol) and 33% (6-state protocol).     

Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution with hyper-encoding

Measurement device-independent quantum key distribution(MDI-QKD) protocols are immune to all possible attacks on the photon detectors during quantum communication, but their key generation rates are low compared with those of other QKD schemes.Increasing each individual photon's channel capacity is an efficient way to increase the key generation rate, and high-dimensional(HD) encoding is a powerful tool for increasing the channel capacity of photons. In this paper, we propose an HD MDI-QKD protocol with qudits hyper-encoded in spatial mode and polarization degrees of freedom(DOFs). In the proposed protocol, keys can be generated using the spatial mode and polarization DOFs simultaneously. The proposed protocol is unconditionally secure,even for weak coherent pulses with decoy states. The proposed MDI-QKD protocol may be useful for future quantum secure communication applications.     

Multi-party Semi-quantum Key Agreement with Delegating Quantum Computation

A multi-party semi-quantum key agreement (SQKA) protocol based on delegating quantum computation (DQC) model is proposed by taking Bell states as quantum resources. In the proposed protocol, the participants only need the ability of accessing quantum channel and preparing single photons {|0〉, |1〉, |+〉, |?〉}, while the complicated quantum operations, such as the unitary operations and Bell measurement, will be delegated to the remote quantum center. Compared with previous quantum key agreement protocols, this client-server model is more feasible in the early days of the emergence of quantum computers. In order to prevent the attacks from outside eavesdroppers, inner participants and quantum center, two single photon sequences are randomly inserted into Bell states: the first sequence is used to perform the quantum channel detection, while the second is applied to disorder the positions of message qubits, which guarantees the security of the protocol.     

基于量子远程通信的连续变量量子确定性密钥分配协议

基于量子远程通信的原理, 本文借助双模压缩真空态和相干态, 提出一种连续变量量子确定性密钥分配协议. 在利用零差探测法的情况下协议的传输效率达到了100%. 从信息论的角度分析了协议的安全性, 结果表明该协议可以安全传送预先确定的密钥. 在密钥管理中, 量子确定性密钥分配协议具有量子随机性密钥分配协议不可替代的重要地位和作用. 与离散变量量子确定性密钥分配协议相比, 该协议分发密钥的速率和效率更高, 又协议中用到的连续变量量子态易于产生和操控、适于远距离传输, 因此该协议更具有实际意义.     

Semi-quantum Dialogue Based on Single Photons

In this paper, we propose two semi-quantum dialogue (SQD) protocols by using single photons as the quantum carriers, where one requires the classical party to possess the measurement capability and the other does not have this requirement. The security toward active attacks from an outside Eve in the first SQD protocol is guaranteed by the complete robustness of present semi-quantum key distribution (SQKD) protocols, the classical one-time pad encryption, the classical party’s randomization operation and the decoy photon technology. The information leakage problem of the first SQD protocol is overcome by the classical party’ classical basis measurements on the single photons carrying messages which makes him share their initial states with the quantum party. The security toward active attacks from Eve in the second SQD protocol is guaranteed by the classical party’s randomization operation, the complete robustness of present SQKD protocol and the classical one-time pad encryption. The information leakage problem of the second SQD protocol is overcome by the quantum party’ classical basis measurements on each two adjacent single photons carrying messages which makes her share their initial states with the classical party. Compared with the traditional information leakage resistant QD protocols, the advantage of the proposed SQD protocols lies in that they only require one party to have quantum capabilities. Compared with the existing SQD protocol, the advantage of the proposed SQD protocols lies in that they only employ single photons rather than two-photon entangled states as the quantum carriers. The proposed SQD protocols can be implemented with present quantum technologies.     

Authenticated Quantum Key Distribution with Collective Detection using Single Photons

We present two authenticated quantum key distribution (AQKD) protocols by utilizing the idea of collective (eavesdropping) detection. One is a two-party AQKD protocol, the other is a multiparty AQKD protocol with star network topology. In these protocols, the classical channels need not be assumed to be authenticated and the single photons are used as the quantum information carriers. To achieve mutual identity authentication and establish a random key in each of the proposed protocols, only one participant should be capable of preparing and measuring single photons, and the main quantum ability that the rest of the participants should have is just performing certain unitary operations. Security analysis shows that these protocols are free from various kinds of attacks, especially the impersonation attack and the man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack.     

A Multi-party Quantum Key Agreement Protocol Based on Shamir’s Secret Sharing

Quantum networks can extend the advantages of quantum key distribution protocols to more than two remote participants. Based on Shamir threshold secret sharing scheme, a new quantum key agreement protocol on a quantum network with any number of participants is proposed. First, each participant and distributor negotiate a sub-secret key using a kind of quantum key distribution protocol, and then each of these participants, as distributor, shares these sub-secret keys with other participants using Shamir threshold secret sharing scheme. Furthermore, each participant combines all these shared sub-secret keys and his own sub-secret key in sequence to form secret key, and sends the hash function values of this secret key to the master distributor to authenticate, finally they obtain the security key. Our scheme is practical and secure, and it can also prevent fraudulent from participants.

     

How Secure Are Two-Way Ping-Pong and LM05 QKD Protocols under a Man-in-the-Middle Attack?

We consider a man-in-the-middle attack on two-way quantum key distribution ping-pong and LM05 protocols in which an eavesdropper copies all messages in the message mode, while being undetectable in the mode. Under the attack there is therefore no disturbance in the message mode and the mutual information between the sender and the receiver is always constant and equal to one and messages copied by the eavesdropper are always genuine. An attack can only be detected in the control mode but the level of detection at which the protocol should be aborted is not defined. We examine steps of the protocol to evaluate its security and find that the protocol should be redesigned. We also compare it with the security of a one-way asymmetric BB84-like protocol in which one basis serves as the message mode and the other as the control mode but which does have the level of detection at which the protocol should be aborted defined.     

Network-topology-adaptive quantum conference protocols

As an important application of the quantum network communication,quantum multiparty conference has made multiparty secret communication possible.Previous quantum multiparty conference schemes based on quantum data encryption are insensitive to network topology.However,the topology of the quantum network significantly affects the communication efficiency,e.g.,parallel transmission in a channel with limited bandwidth.We have proposed two distinctive protocols,which work in two basic network topologies with efficiency higher than the existing ones.We first present a protocol which works in the reticulate network using Greeberger-Horne-Zeilinger states and entanglement swapping.Another protocol,based on quantum multicasting with quantum data compression,which can improve the efficiency of the network,works in the star-like network.The security of our protocols is guaranteed by quantum key distribution and one-time-pad encryption.In general,the two protocols can be applied to any quantum network where the topology can be equivalently transformed to one of the two structures we propose in our protocols.