Authentication Key Distribution Research Articles

Mutual authentication key distribution protocol based on ghost imaging

The key distribution protocol based on ghost imaging has attracted wide attention due to its strong robustness, fast key generation rate and security without the influence of distance. However, the lack of identity authentication leads to potential security risks, while there are still major challenges in how to minimize storage costs, the communication overhead and computational overhead involved in the process of key distribution. In this paper, we propose a key distribution protocol under the ghost imaging framework, which could be achieved mutual authentication between users and key distribution centers on public networks. In the process of information interaction, only the intensity sequences encrypted by ghost imaging need to be transmitted, which reduces the amount of data and ensures the confidentiality and imperceptibility of information. Meanwhile, the illumination patterns used for decryption are only reserved in the key distribution center without transmission, which not only reduces the security risks caused by the theft of the illumination patterns, but also reduces the user’s demand for storage and computing power. Simulation and experiments show the effectiveness of this protocol, which can effectively resist exhaustive attack, tampering attack and noise attack. This protocol provides a new idea for key distribution and a new protection method for optical secure communication.

Direct proof of security of Wegman–Carter authentication with partially known key

Information-theoretically secure (ITS) authentication is needed in Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). In this paper, we study security of an ITS authentication scheme proposed by Wegman & Carter, in the case of partially known authentication key. This scheme uses a new authentication key in each authentication attempt, to select a hash function from an Almost Strongly Universal$_2$ hash function family. The partial knowledge of the attacker is measured as the trace distance between the authentication key distribution and the uniform distribution; this is the usual measure in QKD. We provide direct proofs of security of the scheme, when using partially known key, first in the information-theoretic setting and then in terms of witness indistinguishability as used in the Universal Composability (UC) framework. We find that if the authentication procedure has a failure probability $\epsilon$ and the authentication key has an $\epsilon'$ trace distance to the uniform, then under ITS, the adversary's success probability conditioned on an authentic message-tag pair is only bounded by $\epsilon+|\mT|\epsilon'$, where $|\mT|$ is the size of the set of tags. Furthermore, the trace distance between the authentication key distribution and the uniform increases to $|\mT|\epsilon'$ after having seen an authentic message-tag pair. Despite this, we are able to prove directly that the authenticated channel is indistinguishable from an (ideal) authentic channel (the desired functionality), except with probability less than $\epsilon+\epsilon'$. This proves that the scheme is ($\epsilon+\epsilon'$)-UC-secure, without using the composability theorem.