Abstract
Digital signatures guarantee the authenticity and transferability of messages, and are widely used in modern communication. The security of currently used classical digital signature schemes, however, relies on computational assumptions. In contrast, quantum digital signature (QDS) schemes offer information-theoretic security guaranteed by the laws of quantum mechanics. We present two QDS protocols which have the same experimental requirements as quantum key distribution, which is already commercially available. We also present the first security proof for any QDS scheme against coherent forging attacks.
Highlights
Digital signatures are commonly used to guarantee the identity of a sender and the authenticity of a message, for example, in electronic commerce and e-mail
Quantum digital signature (QDS) schemes offer information-theoretic security guaranteed by the laws of quantum mechanics
We present two quantum digital signature (QDS) protocols which have the same experimental requirements as quantum key distribution, which is already commercially available
Summary
Digital signatures are commonly used to guarantee the identity of a sender and the authenticity of a message, for example, in electronic commerce and e-mail. There are few information-theoretically secure classical digital signature schemes based on secret shared keys, and all of them require extra assumptions such as the existence of a trusted third party [8,9] or the existence of authenticated broadcast channels [10]. Just as for QKD, for QDS schemes one assumes that between each pair of the parties, Alice, Bob and Charlie, there exists an authenticated classical channel, guaranteeing that classical messages cannot be tampered with. Such channels are resource inexpensive [11]. We formulate our protocol with nonideal channels in mind, and note that analysis of previous QDS experiments [4,6] has considered imperfections in scenarios with only individual forging attacks
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