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Designing Secure Quantum Key Agreement Protocols Against Dishonest Participants

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Abstract

Quantum key agreement (QKA) aims to negotiate a secure and consistent key among several participants. In this paper, we find that a type of QKA protocol is not secure when a participant is dishonest. He can make the honest participants obtain wrong final keys, which may lead to serious consequences. To resist such attacks, we design a defense strategy by introducing a trusted third party. The theoretical analysis results show that our defense strategy not only can detect the dishonest participant’s attacks, but also can identify who is dishonest. Finally we design an optical platform for participants, and show that both our attack and defense strategies are feasible with current technologies.

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Acknowledgements

This research is financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (NO. 2017YFA0303700), the Major Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11690030, 11690032), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61771236), and the Excellence Research Program of Nanjing University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210046, People’s Republic of China

    Wei-cong Huang, Yong-kai Yang, Dong Jiang, Chao-hui Gao & Li-jun Chen

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  1. Wei-cong Huang
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  2. Yong-kai Yang
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  3. Dong Jiang
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  4. Chao-hui Gao
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Correspondence to Dong Jiang.

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Huang, Wc., Yang, Yk., Jiang, D. et al. Designing Secure Quantum Key Agreement Protocols Against Dishonest Participants. Int J Theor Phys 58, 4093–4104 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10773-019-04275-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10773-019-04275-5

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