A Novel Protocol-Authentication Algorithm Ruling Out a Man-in-the Middle Attack in Quantum Cryptography

Peev, Momtchil; Nölle, Michael; Maurhardt, O.; Lorünser, Thomas; Suda, Martin; Poppe, Andreas; Ursin, Rupert; Fedrizzi, Alessandro; Zeilinger, Anton

doi:10.1142/s0219749905000797

Cited by 28 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…In doing so Eve manages to modify her respective protocol messages such that these collide with those of Alice and Bob under the first part of the authentication of Ref. [24]. Depending on the protocol variants (e.g., immediate vs. delayed authentication), the different attacks which we study address sifting, error correction, confirmation, and privacy amplification or only some of these steps.…”

Section: New Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Pacher

Abidin

Lorünser

et al. 2015

Quantum Inf Process

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We demonstrate how adversaries with large 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-TheMiddle (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 authenti- cation 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.

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Section: New Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The non-ITS authentication mechanism of Ref. [24] The authentication mechanism proposed in Ref. [24] aimed to consume less key than ASU 2 authentication.…”

Section: 3mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Pacher

Abidin

Lorünser

et al. 2015

Quantum Inf Process

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“…For details on the integration of QKD in security infrastructures, the reader is kindly advised to refer to [23] and [24], for example.  Hybrid PKI-based approach: There are some researchers (See for example [25]) who think that properly combining QKD with public-key based authentication can also provide working environment with enhanced properties. Such hybrid schemes are easier for implementation than pure QKD systems.…”

Section: Presentation Tiermentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Framework for Supporting Unconditionally Secure Authentication Services within E-Government Infrastructures

Al-Janabi

2016

juhd

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Abstract-It has been noticed by many researchers that the speed of ICT advancement in developing, deploying, and using e-government infrastructures is much faster than the development and deployment of security services. Therefore, government organizations are still suffering from the existence and emerging of security risks. One important category of cryptographic primitives that needs to be considered in this respect is the unconditionally secure message authentication codes (or A-codes). These A-codes are cryptographically approached based on information theory. They offer unconditional security, i.e., security independent of the computing power of an adversary. For many years, it was widely thought that A-codes were impractical for real applications. However, in recent years, many A-codes have been developed which are extremely efficient in terms of computations and key requirements.The aim of this work is to show the importance and validation of including unconditionally secure authentication services within e-government infrastructures. We believe that all main e-government services can get benefit from that in a way or another. This includes Government to Citizen (G2C), Government to Business (G2B), Government to Government (G2G), and Government to Constituents (E-Democracy) services. The work highlights the basic requirements for a general framework that facilitates the inclusion of such authentication services within the security infrastructure of e-government.

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“…13, 14 However, it was still possible to close these breaches by relatively straightforward countermeasures in the definitions of the protocols. 1,15 The security of the standard and/or hardened protocols remained an open issue but it appeared plausible that adequately designed protocols remain unaffected.…”

Section: Security Of the "Ijqi-3-225" Authenticationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Alice and Bob never come to realize that the security of their communication is completely lost (see Ref. 1 and references therein for further details).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantum cryptography and authentication with low key-consumption

et al. 2011

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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 universal 2 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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A Novel Protocol-Authentication Algorithm Ruling Out a Man-in-the Middle Attack in Quantum Cryptography

Cited by 28 publications

References 8 publications

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

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

Towards a Framework for Supporting Unconditionally Secure Authentication Services within E-Government Infrastructures

Quantum cryptography and authentication with low key-consumption

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