The QQUIC Transport Protocol: Quantum assisted UDP Internet Connections
This addresses security vulnerabilities in internet communications for users relying on classical cryptographic assumptions, though it is incremental as it builds on the existing QUIC protocol.
The paper tackles the problem of secure key exchange in internet transport protocols by proposing QQUIC, a quantum-assisted modification of QUIC that uses quantum key distribution, resulting in provable security independent of computational assumptions and reduced network latency in some cases.
Quantum key distribution, initialized in 1984, is a commercialized secure communication method which enables two parties to produce shared random secret key by the nature of quantum mechanics. We propose QQUIC (Quantum assisted Quick UDP Internet Connections) transport protocol, which modifies the famous QUIC transport protocol by employing the quantum key distribution instead of the original classical algorithms in the key exchanging stage. Thanks to the provable security of quantum key distribution, the security of QQUIC key does not depend on computational assumptions. Maybe surprisingly, QQUIC can reduce the network latency in some circumstance even comparing with QUIC. To achieve this, the attached quantum connections are used as the dedicated lines for key generation.