Client-Server Identification Protocols with Quantum PUF

TL;DR

This paper introduces two quantum PUF-based identification protocols enabling secure client-server authentication with provable exponential security, suitable for quantum internet applications.

Contribution

The paper presents novel quantum PUF-based identification protocols that offer exponential security against quantum adversaries, improving upon existing methods.

Findings

Protocols achieve exponential security against quantum polynomial-time adversaries.

Resource analysis shows protocols require efficient quantum memory and computation.

Comparison indicates trade-offs in resources and communication overhead.

Abstract

Recently, major progress has been made towards the realisation of quantum internet to enable a broad range of classically intractable applications. These applications such as delegated quantum computation require running a secure identification protocol between a low-resource and a high-resource party to provide secure communication. In this work, we propose two identification protocols based on the emerging hardware secure solutions, the quantum Physical Unclonable Functions (qPUFs). The first protocol allows a low-resource party to prove its identity to a high-resource party and in the second protocol, it is vice-versa. Unlike existing identification protocols based on Quantum Read-out PUFs which rely on the security against a specific family of attacks, our protocols provide provable exponential security against any Quantum Polynomial-Time adversary with resource-efficient parties. We provide a comprehensive comparison between the two proposed protocols in terms of resources such as quantum memory and computing ability required in both parties as well as the communication overhead between them.