Authenticated QKD Protocol Based on Single-Photon Interference

Abstract

As is known, quantum key distribution (QKD) can provide information-theoretic security under some preconditions, one of which is that the identity of each participant has been authenticated. And quantum identity authentication (QIA) can achieve this precondition effectively. However, the adversary still can implement man-in-the-middle attacks on QKD protocols in some situations, such as the protocol in [Quant. Inf. Process, 18, 137 (2019)]. In the above paper, the authors claimed that, after their QIA protocol based on GV95 system (GV95-QIA protocol), the participants could perform GV95-QKD protocol to update and extend the authentication keys. However, this method is not secure in the sense that the adversary could wait for the participants to complete GV95-QIA protocol and then perform the man-in-the-middle attack on the QKD process. In this paper, we solve this problem by mixing GV95-QIA process and GV95-QKD process randomly. Specifically, two authenticated QKD protocols are proposed based on the above idea. The proposed protocols can be used to provide secure identity authentication to GV95-QKD protocol, and also can be used to extend the authentication keys for GV95-QIA protocol.

Keywords

• Quantum key distribution
• quantum identity authentication
• single-photon interference