Abstract
The security of Quantum Secure Direct Communication (QSDC) and its authentication procedure based on multiple stages is analyzed. The security analysis shows that the process of authentication is required to be done three times based on the usage of unitary transformation that is only known between Alice and Bob. In the proposed protocol, a secure quantum handshake is utilized to share the secret polarization angle and an authentication key at the initial stage of authentication over the quantum channel. The symmetry key is used in this work to protect user data communication within the QSDC protocol, where the same secret key is used to encrypt and decrypt the message. This work adopts the information travel time (ITT) by allowing the sender to detect any interference from third parties. In addition, the operation of the Pauli-X quantum gate increases Eve’s difficulty in stealing the information. The information transmitted is then continued by sending photons once in the quantum channel, which improves the efficiency without losing the message’s security. In addition, to securely transfer the stream of messages, the proposed protocol is operated in single-stage, and the authentication is applied bit-by-bit, thus reducing the transmission time. Security checks are carried out along the data transmission process. Compared to previous protocols, this new initial authentication protocol has remarkable advantages since it does not require public communication to pre-share the authentication key and secret angles before the onset of the transmission, therefore, reducing the communication cost. Moreover, the secret authentication key and polarization angles are updated after a number of bits are sent to increase the security level. The verification process is also conducted to ensure the symmetry of the sender and receiver. The analyses presented herein demonstrate that the proposed authentication protocol is simple and secure in order to ensure the legitimacy of the users.
Highlights
Quantum Secure Direct Communication (QSDC) protocol is one of the quantum cryptography concepts that securely transmits the message directly in the quantum channel, where all the information deals with the quantum state
Unlike the most well-known QSDC protocols that rely on a slight classical communication to share the pre-shared authentication key at the onset of communication, the proposed protocol fully utilizes the quantum channel to share the secret angle and authentication key at the initial stage of authentication
The proposed protocol can be concluded that public communication or public states are not used to transmit a secret message or verify the parties
Summary
Quantum Secure Direct Communication (QSDC) protocol is one of the quantum cryptography concepts that securely transmits the message directly in the quantum channel, where all the information deals with the quantum state. EPR pairs as carriers to directly transmit information, while single photon QSDC combined a one-time pad protocol with the secret message [3]. The aim of this paper is, to recommend a secure way to share the initial secret angle and authentication key between users over a multi-stage quantum channel. To solve the problem of initial communication in the authentication phase, a quantum handshake protocol is proposed to share Alice’s secret angle and the authentication key [15]. It should be noted that Alice is a trusted party that does not mislead the information This protocol will significantly improve the existing multi-photon works of references [7,9] that need to share the secret angle at the onset of the transmission over the secret channel.
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