Towards Quantum-Secure Authentication and Key Agreement via Abstract Multi-Agent Interaction
This addresses the problem of quantum-secure authentication for users of cryptographic systems, offering a potentially new approach but with incremental aspects in its implementation.
The paper tackles the vulnerability of current public-key cryptography to quantum computing by proposing a novel authentication and key agreement method based on multi-agent interactions, where security relies on the difficulty of modeling agents' decisions, and it includes a prototype system and empirical validation against adversarial attacks.
Current methods for authentication and key agreement based on public-key cryptography are vulnerable to quantum computing. We propose a novel approach based on artificial intelligence research in which communicating parties are viewed as autonomous agents which interact repeatedly using their private decision models. Authentication and key agreement are decided based on the agents' observed behaviors during the interaction. The security of this approach rests upon the difficulty of modeling the decisions of interacting agents from limited observations, a problem which we conjecture is also hard for quantum computing. We release PyAMI, a prototype authentication and key agreement system based on the proposed method. We empirically validate our method for authenticating legitimate users while detecting different types of adversarial attacks. Finally, we show how reinforcement learning techniques can be used to train server models which effectively probe a client's decisions to achieve more sample-efficient authentication.