Quantum Man-in-the-middle Attacks: a Game-theoretic Approach with Applications to Radars

TL;DR

This paper models quantum man-in-the-middle attacks as a game-theoretic problem, analyzing how adversarial behaviors can compromise quantum radar detection performance through a comparative study.

Contribution

It introduces a game-theoretic framework for quantum man-in-the-middle attacks and applies it to quantum radar detection scenarios, highlighting vulnerabilities.

Findings

Evasive behaviors significantly reduce quantum detection accuracy.

Passive detectors are more vulnerable to adversarial distortions.

Quantum radars can be compromised by strategic attacks.

Abstract

The detection and discrimination of quantum states serve a crucial role in quantum signal processing, a discipline that studies methods and techniques to process signals that obey the quantum mechanics frameworks. However, just like classical detection, evasive behaviors also exist in quantum detection. In this paper, we formulate an adversarial quantum detection scenario where the detector is passive and does not know the quantum states have been distorted by an attacker. We compare the performance of a passive detector with the one of a non-adversarial detector to demonstrate how evasive behaviors can undermine the performance of quantum detection. We use a case study of target detection with quantum radars to corroborate our analytical results.