On the lightweight authenticated semi-quantum key distribution protocol without Trojan horse attack
This work addresses security flaws in quantum key distribution for quantum-classical communication, but it is incremental as it builds directly on prior research.
The paper identifies a vulnerability in a previous lightweight authenticated semi-quantum key distribution protocol, where an attacker can cause participants to share an incorrect key undetected, and proposes an improved protocol to address this issue.
Recently, Tsai et al. (Laser Phys. Lett. 17, 075202, 2020) proposed a lightweight authenticated semi-quantum key distribution protocol for a quantum participant to share a secret key with a classical participant. However, this study points out that an attacker can use a modification attack to make both participants share a wrong key without being detected. To avoid this problem, an improvement is proposed here.