A Practical Identity Authentication Scheme for
Measurement-Device-Independent Quantum Key
Distribution
Shuquan Ma, Changhua Zhu*, Changxing Pei
State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks
Xidian University
Xi’an, China
Email:msqloveslife@outlook.com, chhzhu@xidian.edu.cn, chxpei@xidian.edu.cn
Abstract—In cryptography, an identity authentication protocol
can be used to identify the legitimation of users in commu-
nication. Usually, it is totally irrelative with key distribution
protocol. From this point of view, we introduce a novel mutual
identity authentication scheme on the basis of measurement-
device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) pro-
tocol, which utilizes the monogamous property of the Bell
states. As a result, our proposed protocol can achieve identity
authentication and key distribution in one round. Besides, we
merge the estimation of error rate into the processing of identity
authentication, it can make MDI-QKD more efficient. What’s
more, according to the simulation result, the protocol can work
well in a noisy environment. Also due to the property of hash
functions, it can be implemented efficiently with software.
I. INTRODUCTION
Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a technique that allows
two parties, conventionally called Alice and Bob, to share a
common secret key for cryptographic purposes. Since the first
QKD protocol, BB84[1], was proposed, there have been many
different QKD protocols following up[2–4]. Until now, many
protocols have been implemented successfully, e.g. BB84[5]
and MDI-QKD[6][7]. The security of QKD protocols is based
on the fundamental of quantum mechanics, instead of the
computational complexity. However, in order to distribute an
absolutely secure key, QKD protocols also make some extra
hypotheses[8]. For example, communication parties must be
the legitimate users. Fail to do this, an eavesdropper may
pretend to be a legitimate user. Although a classical identity
authentication protocol can resolve this problem (e.g. a digital
signature in RSA), its security is based on the computational
complexity as well. Besides, QKD protocols also assume that
legitimate users share a classical authenticated channel, where
their classical messages are tamper-resistant. This is necessary
for at least two reasons. First, the parties need to probe the
quantum channel so as to have an estimation of the information
leaked on it. For this, they need to compare samples of their
transmissions and measurements. Second, the parties need
to turn the sequence of exchanged random variables into a
common secret key. Another important premise is that QKD
needs a trusted source of truly random numbers, which can
guarantee the generated key is truly random. Fail to have any
of them, the security of QKD will be questioned.
In this paper, we focus mainly on the identify authentication.
Indeed, there exists some identity authentication protocols that
combine the advantages of classical cryptography with the
properties of quantum mechanics, namely, quantum identity
authentication (QIA) protocols[9–12]. In [9], Zeng proposed
that utilizing entangled states to authenticate and distribute se-
cure key, by Bell inequality[13] the protocol can be guaranteed
absolutely secure. Unfortunately, this protocol is considerably
complicated and it needs many communication rounds to
authenticate and distribute, thus it is difficult to realize in
practice. In [11], although a QKD protocol with authentication
is proposed, it remained many issues[14], for example, it
cannot work in a noisy channel and its session key S
K
is
not generated by the QKD protocol but the trusted center.
Based on these facts, we devise a kind of novel quantum
identity authentication scheme that combines MDI-QKD pro-
tocol with the classical identity authentication scheme based
on password. MDI-QKD is a class of important protocol by
which the gap between theory and practice of QKD systems
can be filled efficiently, especially for leakages at receiving
devices. Besides, MDI-QKD is easy to implement and has
farther transmission distance. But inspired by [11], in this
paper we adopt a long preshared random sequence instead of
a short sequence to generate identity information and the final
key, which would be possible as long as the communication
parties can personally contact with each other in advance.
Though a preshared long key is needed in our protocol, we
will see later this sequence can be used as an approximately
longterm one, thus the protocol can be achieved in practice.
And our proposed protocol can not only implement the identity
authentication before communication parties perform QKD
protocol, but also achieve the key distribution at the same time.
The rest of this paper is organized into three sections. In
section II, we begin with a brief retrospect on MDI-QKD
protocol, then we describe the detailed procedure of our
protocol. Section III, we anlayze the security of our protocol
and give the simulation results. The result shows that our
protocol can work under a noisy channel, meanwhile it can
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2017 IEEE