Towards Quantum-Secure Authentication and Key Agreement via Abstract Multi-Agent Interaction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum-resistant authentication and key agreement method using autonomous agent interactions modeled by AI, validated through empirical experiments and reinforced learning techniques.

Contribution

It presents a novel AI-based approach for secure authentication that is conjectured to be resistant to quantum attacks, along with a prototype system and empirical validation.

Findings

Successfully authenticates legitimate users

Detects various adversarial attacks

Uses reinforcement learning for efficient probing

Abstract

Current methods for authentication and key agreement based on public-key cryptography are vulnerable to quantum computing. We propose a novel approach based on artificial intelligence research in which communicating parties are viewed as autonomous agents which interact repeatedly using their private decision models. Authentication and key agreement are decided based on the agents' observed behaviors during the interaction. The security of this approach rests upon the difficulty of modeling the decisions of interacting agents from limited observations, a problem which we conjecture is also hard for quantum computing. We release PyAMI, a prototype authentication and key agreement system based on the proposed method. We empirically validate our method for authenticating legitimate users while detecting different types of adversarial attacks. Finally, we show how reinforcement learning techniques can be used to train server models which effectively probe a client's decisions to achieve more sample-efficient authentication.