Concerning Quantum Identification Without Entanglement
This work highlights security vulnerabilities in quantum identification schemes, which is crucial for ensuring robust authentication in quantum communication systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing theoretical findings.
The paper critiques a recent quantum identity authentication proposal by Zawadzki, demonstrating a concrete attack that reveals non-negligible information on the shared secret, thereby supporting prior theoretical impossibility results from Lo and Buhrman et al.
Identification schemes are interactive protocols typically involving two parties, a prover, who wants to provide evidence of his or her identity and a verifier, who checks the provided evidence and decide whether it comes or not from the intended prover. In this paper, we comment on a recent proposal for quantum identity authentication from Zawadzki, and give a concrete attack upholding theoretical impossibility results from Lo and Buhrman et al. More precisely, we show that using a simple strategyan adversary may indeed obtain non-negligible information on the shared identification secret. While the security of a quantum identity authentication scheme is not formally defined in [1], it is clear that such a definition should somehow imply that an external entity may gain no information on the shared identification scheme (even if he actively participates injecting messages in a protocol execution, which is not assumed in our attack strategy).