Cryptanalysis and improvement of several quantum private comparison protocols

TL;DR

This paper analyzes security flaws in multiple quantum private comparison protocols, demonstrating that existing attacks can compromise secret data, and proposes a more efficient solution to prevent such information leakage.

Contribution

The paper identifies a common security vulnerability in several quantum private comparison protocols and introduces a simple, resource-efficient fix to enhance their security.

Findings

Existing protocols are vulnerable to active and passive attacks.

Wu et al.'s attack method applies to multiple protocols.

The proposed solution effectively prevents information leakage.

Abstract

Recently, Wu et al. [Int. J. Theor. Phys. 58, 1854, (2019)] found a serious information leakage problem in Ye and Ji's quantum private comparison protocol [Int. J. Theor. Phys. 56, 1517, (2017)], that is, a malicious participant can steal another's secret data without being detected through an active attack means. In this paper, we show that Wu et al.'s attack means is also effective for several other existing protocols, including the ones proposed by Ji et al. and Zha et al. [Commun. Theor. Phys. 65, 711, (2016) and Int. J. Theor. Phys. 57, 3874, (2018)]. In addition, we propose a passive attack means, which is different from Wu et al.'s active attack in that the malicious participant can easily steal another's secret data only by using his own secret data after finishing the protocol. Furthermore, we find that several other existing quantum private comparison protocols also have such an information leakage problem. In response to the problem, we propose a simple solution, which is more efficient than the ones proposed by Wu et al., because it does not consume additional classical and quantum resources. We also make some comments on this problem.