An Information-Theoretic Secure Group Authentication Scheme for Quantum Key Distribution Networks
Yi Luo, Haokun Mao, Qiong Li, Nan Chen
Abstract
Information-theoretic secure (ITS) authentication is an essential part of a quantum key distribution (QKD) system. In the QKD network, the authentication scheme based on the ITS QKD keys pre-shared by the QKD system. However, such a scheme is subject to the limitation that consumes a significant amount of authentication keys when the scale and communication requirements of QKD networks grow. To address the issue, we propose an ITS group authentication scheme for QKD networks that consumes considerably fewer keys. In our scheme, multiple QKD network nodes collaborate and complete the authentication as a group. Compared to the pre-shared keys authentication scheme, our scheme reduces the complexity of authentication key consumption from <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O\left ({N^{2}d }\right) $ </tex-math></inline-formula> to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O\left ({N }\right) $ </tex-math></inline-formula> , where <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N $ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the number of nodes and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$d $ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the average path length of the network topology. The security of the proposed scheme is analyzed in detail and simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate our scheme’s effectiveness for varying networks scales and communication requirements.