Cryptanalysis of Quantum Secure Direct Communication Protocol with Mutual Authentication Based on Single Photons and Bell States

TL;DR

This paper critically analyzes a quantum secure direct communication protocol with authentication, revealing vulnerabilities to intercept-and-resend and impersonation attacks, and proposes a modified, more secure version.

Contribution

It identifies security flaws in a recent QSDC protocol and introduces a modified protocol that resists common quantum attack strategies.

Findings

The original protocol is vulnerable to intercept-and-resend attacks.

Impersonation attacks can compromise the secret message.

The proposed modification enhances security against known quantum attacks.

Abstract

Recently, Yan et al. proposed a quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol with authentication using single photons and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs (Yan et al., CMC-Computers, Materials \& Continua, 63(3), 2020). In this work, we show that the QSDC protocol is not secure against intercept-and-resend attack and impersonation attack. An eavesdropper can get the full secret message by applying these attacks. We propose a modification of this protocol, which defeats the above attacks along with all the familiar attacks.