Cryptanalysis and Improvement on Authenticated Semi-quantum Direct Communication Protocol using Bell States

  • PDF / 286,928 Bytes
  • 7 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
  • 71 Downloads / 235 Views

DOWNLOAD

REPORT


Cryptanalysis and Improvement on Authenticated Semi-quantum Direct Communication Protocol using Bell States Chia-Wei Tsai 1 & Chun-Wei Yang 2,3 Received: 25 August 2020 / Accepted: 10 November 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract

Luo and Hwang [Quantum Inf. Process (2016) 15:947–958] proposed the authenticated semi-quantum direct communication protocols for a quantum participant to be able to transmit secret messages to a classical participant without employing an authenticated classical channel. However, this study indicates that there is an information leakage problem in Luo and Hwang’s measure-resend protocol. The information leakage problem might allow an attacker to use an intercept-resend attack to obtain partial secret messages. Finally, an improved method is proposed to overcome the information leakage problem. Keywords Bell state . Intercept-and-resend attack . Quantum direct communication . Semiquantum

1 Introduction Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is an important research topic in quantum communication. In contrast to the quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol, whose objective is to establish a secret key between two participants, QSDC enables two participants to transmit secret messages directly without the need to establish a key for message encryption. Since the establishment of three earliest QSDC protocols [1–3], diverse QSDC protocols have

* Chia-Wei Tsai [email protected] Chun-Wei Yang [email protected]

1

Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taitung University, 95092 Taitung, Taiwan

2

Center for General Education, China Medical University, 40402 Taichung, Taiwan

3

Master Program for Digital Health Innovation, College of Humanities and Sciences, China Medical University, 40402 Taichung, Taiwan

International Journal of Theoretical Physics

been proposed [4–28]. Some of these protocols use the entanglement states [4–18]; some use the non-entanglement states [19–21], and others [22–24] adopt the measurement-device independence strategy. In addition, several researchers [25–28] have experimentally demonstrated the feasibility of the QSDC protocols. The above-mentioned protocols assume that the participants have complete quantum capabilities (e.g., they can generate any quantum state, store qubits, and perform any unitary operation). However, quantum devices are expensive and difficult to implement. To address this issue, Boyer et al. [29] proposed a semi-quantum environment having two types of participants, namely, classical and quantum participants. A classical participant only has limited quantum capabilities, including (1) measuring qubits with the Z-basis fj0〉; j1〉g, (2) generating qubits with the Z-basis, (3) reflecting qubits with a disturbance, (4) reordering qubits using different delay lines, and (5) performing singlephoton unitary operations. In contrast, a quantum participant has complete quantum capabilities. After the establishment of Boyer et al.’s semi-quantum key distribution pro