Comment on “A practical protocol for three-party authenticated quantum key distribution”

Abstract

Guan et al. (Quantum Inf Process 13(11):2355---2374, 2014) proposed a three-party authenticated quantum key distribution protocol which allows two participants to authenticate each other and eventually share a session key between them with the help of a trusted center (TC), who has pre-shared a master key with each participant, respectively. After a successful authentication and key distribution process, TC and the participants update their master keys, respectively. However, this study points out that Guan et al.'s scheme suffers from the intercept-and-measure attack and information leakage problem, and has the synchronization problem.