Cryptanalysis of The Quantum Secure Direct Communication and Authentication Protocol With Single Photons

TL;DR

This paper critically examines a quantum secure direct communication protocol with authentication, revealing vulnerabilities that allow key compromise, and proposes modifications to enhance its security against such attacks.

Contribution

The paper identifies security flaws in an existing protocol and introduces a modified version that addresses these vulnerabilities, improving quantum communication security.

Findings

The original protocol is vulnerable to specific attacks that can reveal shared secrets.

A modified protocol is proposed that closes the security gap.

Security analysis shows the improved protocol resists the identified attack.

Abstract

We analyze the security of a quantum secure direct communication protocol equipped with authentication. We first propose a specifc attack on the protocol by which, an adversary can break the secret already shared between Alice and Bob, when he (adversary) runs the protocol few times. The attack shows that there is a gap in authentication procedure of the protocol, and by doing so the adversary can obtain the key without remaining any trace. We then give the modification of the protocol and analyze the security of it, and show how the modified protocol can close the gap.