Distributed Information-theoretical Secure Protocols for Quantum Key Distribution Networks against Malicious Nodes

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel distributed authentication and consensus scheme to enhance security and correctness in quantum key distribution networks against malicious nodes, reducing key consumption and improving resilience.

Contribution

It introduces an ITS distributed authentication scheme with identity unforgeability and non-repudiation, and a fault-tolerant consensus method for QKD networks, addressing active malicious attacks.

Findings

Lower growth in authentication key consumption compared to traditional schemes

Enhanced security properties like identity unforgeability and non-repudiation

Efficient consensus with fixed classical broadcast rounds

Abstract

Quantum key distribution (QKD) networks are expected to enable information-theoretical secure (ITS) communication over a large-scale network. Most researches on relay-based QKD network assume that all relays or nodes are completely trustworthy. However, the malicious behavior of any single node can undermine security of QKD networks. Current research on QKD networks primarily addresses passive attacks conducted by malicious nodes such as eavesdropping. We suggest a novel paradigm, inspired by distributed systems, to address the active attack by collaborate malicious nodes in QKD networks. Firstly, regarding security, we introduce the ITS distributed authentication scheme, which additionally offers two crucial security properties to QKD networks: identity unforgeability and non-repudiation. Secondly, concerning correctness, our ITS fault-tolerant consensus method, ensures ITS and global consistency with fixed classical broadcast rounds, contrasting with the exponentially message-intensive Byzantine agreement method. Through our simulation, we have shown that our scheme exhibits a significantly lower growth trend in authentication key consumption compared to the original end-to-end pre-shared keys scheme.