Experimental quantum e-commerce

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a quantum e-commerce scheme that ensures secure contract signing and payment among three parties, resistant to device imperfections, with practical signature rates for secure online transactions.

Contribution

It introduces the first quantum e-commerce protocol involving multiple parties that maintains security despite device imperfections.

Findings

Achieves a signature rate of 0.82 per second for 0.428 MB agreements with 25 dB attenuation.

Demonstrates resistance to attacks from imperfect quantum devices.

Provides a practical approach to secure quantum e-commerce implementations.

Abstract

E-commerce, a type of trading that occurs at a high frequency on the Internet, requires guaranteeing the integrity, authentication and non-repudiation of messages through long distance. As current e-commerce schemes are vulnerable to computational attacks, quantum cryptography, ensuring information-theoretic security against adversary's repudiation and forgery, provides a solution to this problem. However, quantum solutions generally have much lower performance compared to classical ones. Besides, when considering imperfect devices, the performance of quantum schemes exhibits a significant decline. Here, for the first time, we demonstrate the whole e-commerce process of involving the signing of a contract and payment among three parties by proposing a quantum e-commerce scheme, which shows resistance of attacks from imperfect devices. Results show that with a maximum attenuation of 25 dB among participants, our scheme can achieve a signature rate of 0.82 times per second for an agreement size of approximately 0.428 megabit. This proposed scheme presents a promising solution for providing information-theoretic security for e-commerce.