Home // International Journal On Advances in Security, volume 9, numbers 1 and 2, 2016 // View article

Implementation and Evaluation of Intrinsic Authentication in Quantum Key Distribution Protocols

Authors:
Stefan Rass
Sandra König
Stefan Schauer
Oliver Maurhart

Keywords: Quantum Key Distribution; Authentication; BB84; QKD Implementation; Experimental Quantum Key Distribution

Abstract:
We describe a method to authenticate the qubit stream being exchanged during the first phases of the BB84 quantum key distribution without pre-shared secrets. Unlike the conventional approach that continuously authenticates all protocol messages on the public channel, our proposal is to authenticate the qubit stream already to verify the peer's identity. To this end, we employ a second public channel that is physically and logically disjoint from the one used for BB84. This is our substitute for the otherwise necessary assumption on the existence of pre-shared secrets. To practically verify the expected improvement in terms of bandwidth consumption during the public discussion part of BB84, we implemented the scheme within an existing BB84 framework, and emulated the additional public channel used by Bob with the help of additional messages on the same channel. On this implementation, simulations were conducted that confirm the efficiency, bandwidth improvements and to illustrate the difficulties in forging an authentication based on the qubit streams only (as a person-in-the-middle attack is already detected before the public discussion part in our variant of BB84).

Pages: 59 to 65

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2016. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2016

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2636