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- Abidin, Aysajan, et al.
(författare)
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Quantum cryptography and authentication with low key-consumption
- 2011
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Ingår i: Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering. - : SPIE. - 9780819488176 ; , s. 818916-
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Quantum Key Distribution (QKD - also referred to as Quantum Cryptography) is a technique for secret key agreement. It has been shown that QKD rigged with Information-Theoretic Secure (ITS) authentication (using secret key) of the classical messages transmitted during the key distribution protocol is also ITS. Note, QKD without any authentication can trivially be broken by man-in-the-middle attacks. Here, we study an authentication method that was originally proposed because of its low key consumption; a two-step authentication that uses a publicly known hash function, followed by a secret strongly universal2 hash function, which is exchanged each round. This two-step authentication is not information-theoretically secure but it was argued that nevertheless it does not compromise the security of QKD. In the current contribution we study intrinsic weaknesses of this approach under the common assumption that the QKD adversary has access to unlimited resources including quantum memories. We consider one implementation of Quantum Cryptographic protocols that use such authentication and demonstrate an attack that fully extract the secret key. Even including the final key from the protocol in the authentication does not rule out the possibility of these attacks. To rectify the situation, we propose a countermeasure that, while not informationtheoretically secure, restores the need for very large computing power for the attack to work. Finally, we specify conditions that must be satisfied by the two-step authentication in order to restore informationtheoretic security.
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| 2. |
- Joshi, Siddarth Koduru, et al.
(författare)
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Space QUEST mission proposal : experimentally testing decoherence due to gravity
- 2018
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Ingår i: New Journal of Physics. - : IOP Publishing. - 1367-2630. ; 20
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Models of quantum systems on curved space-times lack sufficient experimental verification. Some speculative theories suggest that quantum correlations, such as entanglement, may exhibit different behavior to purely classical correlations in curved space. By measuring this effect or lack thereof, we can test the hypotheses behind several such models. For instance, as predicted by Ralph et al [5] and Ralph and Pienaar [1], a bipartite entangled system could decohere if each particle traversed through a different gravitational field gradient. We propose to study this effect in a ground to space uplink scenario. We extend the above theoretical predictions of Ralph and coworkers and discuss the scientific consequences of detecting/failing to detect the predicted gravitational decoherence. We present a detailed mission design of the European Space Agency's Space QUEST (Space-Quantum Entanglement Space Test) mission, and study the feasibility of the mission scheme.
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| 3. |
- Pacher, Christoph, et al.
(författare)
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Attacks on quantum key distribution protocols that employ non-ITS authentication
- 2016
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Ingår i: Quantum Information Processing. - : Springer Publishing Company. - 1570-0755 .- 1573-1332. ; 15:1, s. 327-362
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- 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 QKDpostprocessing. 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.
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