Semi-quantum mutual identity authentication using single particles

Wireless sensor network (WSN) have been applied in many different areas. Mutual authentication is an important service in WSN. In 2010, Chen and Shih proposed a robust mutual authentication (RMA) protocol for WSN. However, this paper points out that Chen-Shih's RMA protocol has some drawbacks: (1) user impersonation attacks by a malicious registered user, (2) GW-node impersonation attacks by a malicious registered user, (3) sensor node impersonation attacks by a malicious registered user, (4) privileged insider attacks, and (5) time synchronization problem.

Cryptanalysis of the Cho et al. protocol: A hash-based RFID tag mutual authentication protocol

This paper proposes a secure session key exchange and mutual authentication scheme between mobile machines in WLAN-based ad hoc networks. One of the main security challenges for secure machine to machine communication is to accomplish a simple and efficient session key exchange and mutual authentication. The main idea of this paper is that non-interactive session key exchange uses the mobile machine's ID and mutual authentication without communication with an authentication server whenever a data transmission occurs between the mobile machines. The proposed scheme is secure against man-in-the-middle attack, impersonation attack, and modification attack.

<sec>The absolute security of quantum communication protocols relies on a critical premise: all participating parties are legitimate users. Ensuring the legitimacy of participant identities is paramount in complex real-world communication environments. Quantum identity authentication (QIA), in which fundamental principles of quantum mechanics are used to achieve unilateral or mutual authentication between communicating parties, constitutes an indispensable core component for building a comprehensive quantum secure communication system. It holds significant research value in the field of quantum communication.</sec><sec>This review employs a comparative classification method to systematically outline the research trajectory of QIA protocols. By categorizing protocols based on the required quantum resources and the types of quantum protocols employed, the advantages and disadvantages of various categories are analyzed in terms of efficiency, security, and practicality. Single-photon protocols require low resources, and they are easy to implement, and compatible with existing optical components, but require high-efficiency single-photon detectors and exhibit weak noise resistance. Entangled-state protocols offer high security and strong resistance to eavesdropping, particularly suitable for long-distance or multi-party authentication. However, they greatly depend on the preparation and maintenance of high-precision, stable multi-particle entanglement sources, resulting in high experimental complexity. Continuous-variable (CV) protocols achieve high transmission efficiency in short-distance metropolitan area networks and are compatible with classical optical communication equipment, making experiments relatively straightforward. Yet, they require high-precision modulation technology and are sensitive to channel loss. Hybrid protocols aim to balance resource efficiency and security while reducing reliance on a single quantum source, but their design is complex and may introduce new attack vectors. Quantum key distribution (QKD) framework protocols embed identity authentication in the key distribution process, making them suitable for scenarios requiring long-term secure key distribution, although they often depend on pre-shared keys or trusted third parties. Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) framework protocols integrate authentication with secure direct information transmission, offering high efficiency for real-time communication, but requiring high channel quality. Measurement-device-independent QSDC (MDI-QSDC) represents a key development direction that can resist attacks on measurement devices. Quantum teleportation (QT) framework protocols achieves cross-node authentication and unconditional security, making it suitable for quantum relay networks despite its high experimental complexity. The entanglement swapping framework protocol can resist conspiracy attacks and is suitable for multi-party joint scenarios, but it consumes a lot of resources and relies on trusted third party. Ping-pong protocol framework supports dynamic key updates and exhibits strong resistance to eavesdropping, making it suitable for temporary authentication on mobile terminals, although it typically only supports unilateral authentication and requires a bidirectional channel.</sec><sec>Subsequently, this review details the latest QIA protocols of our research group, including a multi-party synchronous identity authentication protocol based on Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states, and a tripartite QSDC protocol with identity authentication capabilities utilizing polarization-spatial super-coding. The GHZ-based multi-party synchronous authentication protocol leverages the strong correlations inherent in GHZ states to achieve simultaneous authentication among multiple parties. Through a carefully designed two-round decoy-state detection mechanism, it effectively resists both external eavesdropping and internal attacks originating from authenticated users, thereby enhancing the efficiency and security of identity management in large-scale quantum networks. The core innovation of the polarization-spatial super-coding tripartite QSDC protocol lies in its deep integration of the authentication process with information transmission by utilizing the spatial degrees of freedom of single photons. This design accomplishes the identity verification of two senders and the transmission of secret information within a single protocol run, ensuring end-to-end security through a three-stage security check. This “authentication-as-communication” paradigm significantly improves the overall efficiency and practicality of the protocol. Its successful implementation also relies on advancements in quantum memory technology.</sec><sec>Finally, the review outlines future research directions for quantum identity authentication and explores its potential applications in quantum communication. The QIA research needs to focus on reducing resource dependency, exploring more efficient protocol designs, further enhancing protocol integration and robustness, prioritizing the development of protocols adaptable to real-world environments, and actively investigating integration with novel scenarios. This comprehensive review aims to provide theoretical research foundations and technical support for the practical development of future quantum identity authentication.</sec>

In recent years, RFID (radio-frequency identification) systems are widely used in many applications. One of the most important applications for this technology is the Internet of things (IoT). Therefore, researchers have proposed several authentication protocols that can be employed in RFID-based IoT systems, and they have claimed that their protocols can satisfy all security requirements of these systems. However, in RFID-based IoT systems we have mobile readers that can be compromised by the adversary. Due to this attack, the adversary can compromise a legitimate reader and obtain its secrets. So, the protocol designers must consider the security of their proposals even in the reader compromised scenario. In this paper, we consider the security of the ultra-lightweight RFID mutual authentication (ULRMAPC) protocol recently proposed by Fan et al. They claimed that their protocol could be applied in the IoT systems and provide strong security. However, in this paper we show that their protocol is vulnerable to denial of service, reader and tag impersonation and de-synchronization attacks. To provide a solution, we present a new authentication protocol, which is more secure than the ULRMAPC protocol and also can be employed in RFID-based IoT systems.

In cryptography, an identity authentication protocol can be used to identify the legitimation of users in communication. Usually, it is totally irrelative with key distribution protocol. From this point of view, we introduce a novel mutual identity authentication scheme on the basis of measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) protocol, which utilizes the monogamous property of the Bell states. As a result, our proposed protocol can achieve identity authentication and key distribution in one round. Besides, we merge the estimation of error rate into the processing of identity authentication, it can make MDI-QKD more efficient. What's more, according to the simulation result, the protocol can work well in a noisy environment. Also due to the property of hash functions, it can be implemented efficiently with software.

In radio‐frequency identification (RFID) authentication technology, the authentication schemes between reader and tag based on public‐key cryptography (PKC) are much better than those based on symmetric‐key cryptography in terms of expanding the scale of RFID applications and the style of providing service, while the limitation of resource consumption and computation capability of RFID tags makes it difficult to apply traditional PKC to RFID authentications. The cryptoGPS protocol based on PKC proposed by Mcloone and Robshaw suits low‐cost RFID system well, but it just achieves one‐way authentication, and the authentication times are very limited, which makes it vulnerable to coupons‐exhausted DoS attacks. To solve these problems, cryptoGPS protocol is greatly improved to realize the mutual authentication between RFID reader and the tag. In the improved protocol, a readers' public key distribution scheme is proposed to support the mutual authentication and a coupons updating algorithm is presented to resist the aforementioned DoS attack. Moreover, a modified Rabin encryption algorithm and a parameter generation method based on Low Hamming Weight technology are proposed to optimize the implementation of the proposed authentication protocol. And a feasible hardware structure of the protocol is also given. The protocol's simulation results show that the scheme just needs 3232 equivalent gates, and the maximum time of single step is 3.3 ms (500 k clock). The scheme is suitable for the low‐cost tags. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper describes an authentication protocol using a Hardware-Embedded Delay PUF called HELP. HELP derives randomness from within-die path delay variations that occur along the paths within a hardware implementation of a cryptographic primitive, such as AES or SHA-3. The digitized timing values which represent the path delays are stored in a database on a secure server (verifier) as an alternative to storing PUF response bitstrings. This enables the development of an efficient authentication protocol that provides both privacy and mutual authentication. The security properties of the protocol are analyzed using data collected from a set of Xilinx Zynq FPGAs.

Secure communication has achieved a new dimension with the advent of the schemes of quantum key distribution (QKD) as in contrast with classical cryptography, quantum cryptography can provide unconditional security. However, a successful implementation of a scheme for QKD requires identity authentication as a prerequisite. A security loophole in the identity authentication scheme may lead to the vulnerability of the entire secure communication scheme. Consequently, identity authentication is extremely important, and in the last three decades several schemes for identity authentication using quantum resources have been proposed. The chronological development of these protocols, which are now referred to as quantum identity authentication (QIA) protocols, is briefly reviewed here with specific attention to the causal connection involved in their development. The existing protocols are classified on the basis of the required quantum resources, and their relative merits and demerits are analyzed. Further, in the process of the classification of the protocols for QIA, it is observed that the existing protocols can also be classified in a few groups based on the inherent computational tasks used to design the protocols. Realization of these symmetries has led to the possibility of designing a set of new protocols for quantum identity authentication, which are based on the existing schemes for the secure computational and communication tasks. The security of such protocols is also critically analyzed.

Recently, Guo et al. proposed a chaotic maps based mutual authentication and key agreement protocol using smart cards for wireless communications. In this paper, we demonstrate that this protocol does not possess the security of session key. To overcome their security weakness, we propose an improved chaotic maps-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme with the same conditions.

Delegated authentication is a very popular and effective paradigm to deal with entity authentication problems for resource-constrained clients in cyber-physical systems; namely, the authentication between two clients is proxied by a trusted authentication server. However, an attacker may compromise the authentication server to impersonate the clients for sabotaging the cyber-physical systems. To detect the identity fraud attacks caused by an authentication server compromise, we propose two mutual authentication protocols by using a pseudo-random function family and a one-time signature (OTS) scheme. Our idea is to leverage the continuously evolving OTS signing and verifying keys at the signer and the verifier sides respectively for identity fraud detection because an identity fraud attack would violate the victim's honest OTS key update procedure. The proposed protocols are proven secure under a new mutual authentication security model that formulates the identity fraud detection.

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, healthcare continuously harnesses its benefits, propelling advancements in medical practices. Within intelligent healthcare, medical robots play a pivotal role, providing integral support to healthcare professionals, streamlining processes, and delivering efficient services. These robots securely transmit patient treatment plans, transferring them to cloud storage and subsequently storing them in blockchain systems. This innovative approach ensures the integrity and accessibility of patient data, introducing novel avenues for seamless interaction with medical information for hospitals and patients’ families. Despite these advantages, the looming privacy risks associated with sensitive patient data transmission pose a compelling challenge, demanding a comprehensive solution. In response to this challenge, we propose a mutual authentication and key agreement protocol designed to optimize healthcare services while prioritizing data security and patient privacy. To validate the robustness of our authentication protocol, we conduct thorough analyses based on both formal and informal models, establishing a foundational framework for evaluating the protocol’s security. Additionally, we perform a comprehensive comparative analysis, assessing the proposed protocol against existing counterparts across various dimensions. This comparative scrutiny reveals the superiority of our protocol in terms of security, as well as its efficiency in communication cost and computational overhead. These findings affirm the efficacy of our proposed solution in navigating the intricate interplay between medical robotics, blockchain, and data security.

Wireless Sensor Networks are being widely used in many real time applications that require continuous monitoring and maintenance of surroundings and their environment. Communication is a vital operation in WSN and most of the times the data is confidential. Hence, security of data is a major concern in WSN and it has been observed that a secure authentication mechanism will ensure confidentiality and integrity of data in WSN. Many authentication mechanisms have been designed but most of them require the sensor nodes to have much computational resources, involves much communication and storage overheads and are quite complex. In this paper, we propose a simple, secure, dynamic, scalable, efficient and lightweight protocol for mutual authentication of nodes in WSN. The protocol is based on tokens, each sensor node acquires a token from base station (BS) and later on without any involvement of BS sensor nodes mutually authenticate each other using acquired tokens. The proposed protocol was modeled in scyther for verification and no potential attacks were detected.

To better protect the security of the core site, such as precious material storage or the place to be visited by important figure, and to improve the efficiency of the security system of the core site, this paper proposes an identity authentication scheme based on fingerprint authentication and pulse. According to fingerprint and the dynamic password, and on the condition of the pulse for ensuring the fingerprint is effective and living fingerprint, the scheme uses the safe and effective elliptic curve encryption to encrypt the fingerprint and password for encrypted storage and transmission. The experimental results show that this scheme can effectively resist password attack, replaying attack and impersonation attack, and improve efficiency of the identity authentication, so it has great application prospect.

RFID technology can potentially be applied almost everywhere. A typical RFID system involves a reader and a number of tags, which may range from the battery-powered ones with Wi-Fi capabilities, to the low-cost ones that are constrained in resources with even no internal power. Keeping RFID systems secure is important, because they are vulnerable to a number of malicious attacks. As for low-cost RFID systems, security problems become much more challenging, as many traditional security mechanisms are inefficient or even impossible due to resource constraints. Some existing solutions utilize traditional cryptographic primitives such as hash or encryption functions, which are often too expensive in hardware to be implemented on low-cost RFID tags. Furthermore, some other lightweight solutions have been reported to be broken, revealing their keys and ID numbers to the attackers. In this thesis, we propose lightweight solutions to Mutual Authentication and Ownership Transfer for RFID systems. Mutual Authentication mitigates the issues of eavesdropping and cloning of tags. Only authenticated readers and tags will successfully communicate with each other. Furthermore, we adapt our Mutual Authentication scheme to secure the Ownership Transfer of RFID tags, which is a pertinent issue in the scope of RFID. When an item passes from one owner to another, it is undesirable for the old owner to be able to access the tag or read data from it. The new user must therefore update the access-granting information without revealing this to the old owner. Tag search is another important functionality that a RFID system should provide. In this thesis, we study how to secure tag search with a focus on low-cost RFID systems for which existing solution is not efficient. These protocols are all realized by utilizing minimalistic cryptography such as Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) and Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSR). PUFs and LFSRs