Anonymous Transmission Research Articles

Verifiable anonymous quantum communication with authentication based on d-level single-particle states

Anonymous quantum communication (AQC) enables the secure transmission of classical and quantum messages while preserving the anonymity of the sender, receiver, or both. Qudits, quantum states with more advantages than qubits in terms of information transmission rate and eavesdropping detection, offer promising capabilities. In this paper, we propose a verifiable AQC (VAQC) protocol utilizing d-level single-particle states, establishing anonymous entanglement between a public sender and an anonymous receiver. By using quantum teleportation, the public sender can transmit private information to his/her chosen anonymous receiver. The verifiable function of the proposed protocol guarantees the legitimacy of all participants’ identities and verifies the correctness of the anonymous entanglement. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed VAQC protocol satisfies the requirements of correctness, anonymity, and security. The proposed VAQC protocol exhibits extensibility and can be extended to enable private communication between an anonymous sender and an anonymous receiver, as well as anonymous entanglement among multiple participants. This work lays the foundation for practical applications in achieving d-level anonymous entanglement and anonymous transmission of qudits.

Benchmarking of quantum protocols

Quantum network protocols offer new functionalities such as enhanced security to communication and computational systems. Despite the rapid progress in quantum hardware, it has not yet reached a level of maturity that enables execution of many quantum protocols in practical settings. To develop quantum protocols in real world, it is necessary to examine their performance considering the imperfections in their practical implementation using simulation platforms. In this paper, we consider several quantum protocols that enable promising functionalities and services in near-future quantum networks. The protocols are chosen from both areas of quantum communication and quantum computation as follows: quantum money, W-state based anonymous transmission, verifiable blind quantum computation, and quantum digital signature. We use NetSquid simulation platform to evaluate the effect of various sources of noise on the performance of these protocols, considering different figures of merit. We find that to enable quantum money protocol, the decoherence time constant of the quantum memory must be at least three times the storage time of qubits. Furthermore, our simulation results for the w-state based anonymous transmission protocol show that to achieve an average fidelity above 0.8 in this protocol, the storage time of sender’s and receiver’s particles in the quantum memory must be less than half of the decoherence time constant of the quantum memory. We have also investigated the effect of gate imperfections on the performance of verifiable blind quantum computation. We find that with our chosen parameters, if the depolarizing probability of quantum gates is equal to or greater than 0.05, the security of the protocol cannot be guaranteed. Lastly, our simulation results for quantum digital signature protocol show that channel loss has a significant effect on the probability of repudiation.

A Survey of Privacy Protection and Network Security in User On-Demand Anonymous Communication

In an untrusted Internet environment, there is a large amount of user privacy information being vulnerable to various attacks, and it is an important security concern for users on how to protect their privacy, and to further provide the anonymity guarantee. Recently, most privacy-sensitive users prefer anonymous communication to protect their private information from eavesdropping by attackers. Each user has different privacy protection demands for anonymous communication. However, anonymous communication methods cannot meet the various anonymity needs of users. Hence, the user on-demand anonymous communication is proposed, which can dynamically adjust the anonymity level according to a user’s anonymity needs. However, the defense capabilities against attacks are insufficient in the existing user on-demand anonymous communication. Some malicious users in the network employ anonymous communication to hide their identities and attack the Internet. Moreover, the existing user on-demand anonymous communication is weak against traffic classification attacks based on machine learning. Therefore, this paper investigates its progresses and defects in privacy protection and network security. User on-demand anonymous communication is mainly composed of the user side and the transmission side. We separately investigate privacy protection and network security of user on-demand anonymous communication from the user side and the transmission side. By surveying various identity anonymity of users on the user side and the hierarchical anonymous transmission on the transmission side, we find two kinds of serious attacks in user on-demand anonymous communication, i.e., abuse of anonymous communication and traffic classification attacks based on machine learning. To solve the above security issues, we suggest the balancing mechanism of anonymous communication and behavior tracking which is used to prevent anonymous abuse, and the secure defense mechanism which is used to resist traffic classification attacks. To inspire follow-up research, we identify some open problems and emphasize future trends concerning user on-demand anonymous communication.

Anonymous transmission in a noisy quantum network using the W state

We consider the task of anonymously transmitting a quantum message in a network. We present a protocol that accomplishes this task using the W state and we analyze its performance in a quantum network where some form of noise is present. We then compare the performance of our protocol with some of the existing protocols developed for the task of anonymous transmission. We show that, in many regimes, our protocol tolerates more noise and achieves higher fidelities of the transmitted quantum message than the other ones. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our protocol tolerates one non-responsive node. We prove the security of our protocol in a semi-active adversary scenario, meaning that we consider an active adversary and a trusted source.

Anonymous Coherent Network Coding Against Eavesdropping and Jamming

This paper considers a problem of anonymous transmission against eavesdropping and jamming in coherent network coding. We propose an information-theoretical message unlinkability scheme based on coset coding. We show that if an incoming message is transformed to another message of the same coset by adding a random codeword then the incoming and outgoing messages are statistically independent and consequently, unlinkable.

Privacy Preserving Quantum Anonymous Transmission via Entanglement Relay.

Anonymous transmission is an interesting and crucial issue in computer communication area, which plays a supplementary role to data privacy. In this paper, we put forward a privacy preserving quantum anonymous transmission protocol based on entanglement relay, which constructs anonymous entanglement from EPR pairs instead of multi-particle entangled state, e.g. GHZ state. Our protocol achieves both sender anonymity and receiver anonymity against an active adversary and tolerates any number of corrupt participants. Meanwhile, our protocol obtains an improvement in efficiency compared to quantum schemes in previous literature.

An efficient quantum anonymous communication with hybrid entanglement swapping

An efficient information-theoretically secure protocol is proposed. It is built for the anonymous transmission of quantum information. In our proposed scheme, a photon of hybrid entangled pairs is travelling through the participants. After operations performed by the participants, anonymous entanglement transmission channels are generated between the sender and receiver by hybrid entanglement swapping. Our protocol achieves both sender anonymity and receiver anonymity against an active adversary and tolerates any number of corrupt participants. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our protocol has great capacity to teleportate quantum message with fewer resources.

A Cooperative Quantum Anonymous Transmission with Hybrid Entanglement Swapping

Motivated by hybrid entanglement swapping, a cooperative protocol for quantum anonymous transmission is proposed. In the protocol, three pairs of hybrid-entangled photons are deployed in the small-scale quantum network, where a photon is traveling from one random participant to another. After performing by entanglement swapping among all participants, the anonymous transmission system is established in a cooperative way. Analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves the secure anonymity for both sender and receiver. In addition, it can transmit quantum message with high efficiency.

Introducing OGR — a new approach to anonymous IP datagram transmission based on the Chaumian ‘onion’ encryption and the KISS principle

AbstractThe goal of this paper is to introduce a technique, called ‘OGR’, that allows anonymous transmission of IP datagrams of any kind. During the last decade numerous anonymizing solutions implementing the Chaumian ‘onion’ encryption have been proposed. Many of them are dedicated to specific services: either anonymous mail delivery or anonymous storage sharing, while the other ones, referred as low-latency systems, work real-time and are able to anonymize any TCP streams (with preference to http), but poorly deal with or even don’t support other transports. ‘OGR’ is strongly inspired by the original Chaumian Mix-net model and aims at universality (the ability to work at the level of IP datagrams rather than upper-layers protocols) and maximal simplicity (the KISS principle). It discards the idea of fixed circuits (or cascades) present in most low-latency solutions in favor of independent, intelligent packets. Although this approach may occur less efficient for huge data streams it’s able to handle any request-reply protocols including those operating over UDP as well as all applications where other transports or raw IP packets are to be used.

A Secure Integrated Medical Information System

The rapid rise and development of the internet has made digitization of our everyday life common. E-medicine, including electronic prescription records, electronic prescriptions, diagnosis information systems, and others are now being regarded as future trends. As development on the structure and format of electronic patient records and prescriptions matures, the implementation of a comprehensive medical information system is imperative, one which is constructed from integrating the various electronic information systems that is being developed. It is important to allow the implementation of such a system applicable to the present medical environment, which facilitates the integration of electronic patient record from all levels of medical centers and clinics, secures the transmission of these integrated patient records between them, enables the combined use of electronic prescriptions with patients' medications, and permits anonymous or confidential transmission of patients' private data. To put the ideas into practice, in this study, we would like to propose an Integrated Medical Information System.

QUANTUM COMMUNICATION BETWEEN ANONYMOUS SENDER AND ANONYMOUS RECEIVER IN THE PRESENCE OF STRONG ADVERSARY

While many scenarios of anonymous communication can be solved by various famous classical techniques including mix nets or dining cryptographers (DC), an abundant amount of anonymous tasks remains open. In this paper, we present a solution to one such task. Our protocol serves as a private communication channel for quantum messages while ensuring that both the sender and the receiver stay anonymous in a set of all parties. Our protocol is a continuation of our previous work on anonymous transmission of quantum information. The protocol does not require trusted parties, and is secure against an active adversary. It can also withstand denial of service attacks. The protocol exhibits an advantage of quantum resources over classical because no classical solution is known (in the same security settings). Entanglement swapping technique is used to create "symmetry" in the protocol, which makes it very transparent and easier to analyze. The security analysis we present is heavily based on our previous work on quantum anonymous communication. The task we implement is also a nice illustration of a cryptographic task where two parties in a multi-party protocol can be dishonest at the same time, but are not cooperating.

Economical quantum anonymous transmissions

We present a new information-theoretically secure protocol for the anonymous transmission of quantum information. Different from the pioneering works, we use single photons to construct anonymous entanglement instead of multi-partite entangled states in this protocol, and therefore we reduce the complexity of physical implementation in practice.

Noninteractive, Anonymously Authenticated, and Traceable Message Transmission for VANETs

Unlike sensor and other ad-hoc wireless networks, vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are characterized by its high mobility which allows a very short communication interval among onboard units (OBUs) and between an OBU and road-side units (RSUs). This major characterization motivates the design of communication protocols that are noninteractive or at least require a very limited number of rounds between units. The challenging issue is that such protocols must satisfy a number of security services that could be complex by their nature. In secure VANETs protocols, anonymity and traceability are two important services, yet, achieving a satisfactory security level for both of them—with acceptable complexity—is not an easy task due to the contradicting requirements: anonymous transmission must not be traceable by any individual while if a transmission is traceable, then anonymity is threatened. Existing secure VANETs protocols for anonymous and traceable transmissions either, provide unconditional anonymity where traceability and revocation are impossible, or grant trust to a thirdparty not to reveal the identity of a unit unless there is a legal reason. In this paper, we propose the first secure VANET protocol that allows authenticated transmission among OBUs and RSUs and at the same time enjoys the following properties. (i) The transmission among OBUs and RSUs is noninteractive (i.e., a one-move transmission without any interactive setup requirements). (ii) The authenticated transmission between any pair of units is anonymous (i.e., no single authority knows any information about the identity of the communicating OBU). (iii) In serious road crimes (e.g., hit-and-run, road rage, etc.) and under court order, an OBU could be traced to its clear identity. We also show how our protocol could be used to setup a confidential session between any pair of units without relying on extensive number of interactive rounds.