Security Framework for Quantum Distance-Bounding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive security framework for quantum distance-bounding protocols, formalizing adversary models and analyzing protocol security under noise and various fraud attacks.

Contribution

It provides a reusable, formal security framework for quantum distance-bounding, enabling standardized analysis of protocols and attacks.

Findings

Characterized honest acceptance probability under noise.

Bound success probability of distance-fraud attacks.

Analyzed mafia-fraud and terrorist-fraud vulnerabilities.

Abstract

Distance-bounding (DB) protocols let a verifier upper-bound a prover's physical distance by timing rapid challenge-response exchanges. Quantum communication promises simpler DB protocols with stronger security guarantees, yet existing quantum distance-bounding (QDB) proposals are analysed in ad-hoc models and, to the best of our knowledge, lack a common game-based treatment of standard fraud attacks. We contribute (i) a reusable security framework for QDB that fixes system and timing assumptions, specifies a quantum-capable adversary model, formalises distance-, mafia-, and terrorist-fraud experiments, and includes a simple i.i.d. depolarizing noise model; and (ii) an application of this framework to a published QDB protocol. For this protocol we characterise the honest per-round acceptance probability under noise and lift it to the multi-round setting, yielding explicit completeness guarantees as a function of the number of fast rounds, the acceptance threshold, and the noise parameter. For active adversaries we bound the per-round success probability of distance-fraud attacks and analyse the best known mafia-fraud strategy, deriving corresponding multi-round soundness bounds. We also show that the protocol is inherently insecure against terrorist-fraud in our model. The framework cleanly separates protocol-independent definitions from protocol-specific analysis and can be used to evaluate existing and future QDB protocols on a common basis.