Cryptanalysis of Quantum Secure Direct Communication Protocol with Mutual Authentication Based on Single Photons and Bell States
This work addresses security flaws in quantum communication protocols, which is critical for ensuring secure data transmission in quantum networks, though it is incremental as it modifies an existing protocol.
The authors identified security vulnerabilities in a quantum secure direct communication protocol with authentication, showing it is susceptible to intercept-and-resend and impersonation attacks that allow an eavesdropper to obtain the full secret message, and they proposed a modified protocol that defeats these and other known attacks.
Recently, Yan et al. proposed a quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol with authentication using single photons and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs (Yan et al., CMC-Computers, Materials \& Continua, 63(3), 2020). In this work, we show that the QSDC protocol is not secure against intercept-and-resend attack and impersonation attack. An eavesdropper can get the full secret message by applying these attacks. We propose a modification of this protocol, which defeats the above attacks along with all the familiar attacks.