Classical Knowledge for Quantum Security

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decision procedure combining classical algebraic knowledge analysis with quantum operational semantics to evaluate security in quantum cryptographic protocols, demonstrated on a quantum secret sharing scheme.

Contribution

It presents a novel method integrating classical knowledge reasoning with quantum protocol analysis for security verification.

Findings

Identified attack paths under various channel assumptions

Validated the procedure on a quantum secret sharing protocol

Demonstrated the effectiveness of classical knowledge analysis in quantum security

Abstract

We propose a decision procedure for analysing security of quantum cryptographic protocols, combining a classical algebraic rewrite system for knowledge with an operational semantics for quantum distributed computing. As a test case, we use our procedure to reason about security properties of a recently developed quantum secret sharing protocol that uses graph states. We analyze three different scenarios based on the safety assumptions of the classical and quantum channels and discover the path of an attack in the presence of an adversary. The epistemic analysis that leads to this and similar types of attacks is purely based on our classical notion of knowledge.