Myrto Arapinis | LIP6 - Équipe QI

Quantum Lock: A Provable Quantum Communication Advantage

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Physical unclonable functions(PUFs) provide a unique fingerprint to a physical entity by exploiting the inherent physical randomness. Gao et al. discussed the vulnerability of most current-day PUFs to sophisticated machine learning-based attacks. We address this problem by integrating classical PUFs and existing quantum communication technology. Specifically, this paper proposes a generic design of provably secure PUFs, called hybrid locked PUFs(HLPUFs), providing a practical solution for securing classical PUFs. An HLPUF uses a classical PUF(CPUF), and encodes the output into non-orthogonal quantum states to hide the outcomes of the underlying CPUF from any adversary. Here we introduce a quantum lock to protect the HLPUFs from any general adversaries. The indistinguishability property of the non-orthogonal quantum states, together with the quantum lockdown technique prevents the adversary from accessing the outcome of the CPUFs. Moreover, we show that by exploiting non-classical properties of quantum states, the HLPUF allows the server to reuse the challenge-response pairs for further client authentication. This result provides an efficient solution for running PUF-based client authentication for an extended period while maintaining a small-sized challenge-response pairs database on the server side. Later, we support our theoretical contributions by instantiating the HLPUFs design using accessible real-world CPUFs. We use the optimal classical machine-learning attacks to forge both the CPUFs and HLPUFs, and we certify the security gap in our numerical simulation for construction which is ready for implementation.

QEnclave - A practical solution for secure quantum cloud computing

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We introduce a secure hardware device named a QEnclave that can secure the remote execution of quantum operations while only using classical controls. This device extends to quantum computing from the classical concept of a secure enclave that isolates a computation from its environment to provide privacy and tamper-resistance. Remarkably, our QEnclave only performs single qubit rotations but can nevertheless be used to secure an arbitrary quantum computation even if the qubit source is controlled by an adversary. More precisely, by attaching a QEnclave to a quantum computer, a remote client controlling the QEnclave can securely delegate its computation to the server solely using classical communication. We investigate the security of our QEnclave by modeling it as an ideal functionality named remote state rotation (RSR). We show that this resource, similar to the previously introduced functionality of remote state preparation, allows blind delegated quantum computing with perfect security. Our proof under the Abstract Cryptography framework shows the construction of remote state preparation from remote state rotation while preserving security. An immediate consequence is the weakening of the requirements for blind delegated computation. While previous delegated protocols relied on a client that can either generate or measure quantum states, we show that this same functionality can be achieved with a client that only transforms quantum states without generating or measuring them.

A Unified Framework For Quantum Unforgeability

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, we continue the line of work initiated by Boneh and Zhandry at CRYPTO 2013 and EUROCRYPT 2013 in which they formally define the notion of unforgeability against quantum adversaries specifically, for classical message authentication codes and classical digital signatures schemes. We develop a general and parameterised quantum game-based security model unifying unforgeability for both classical and quantum constructions allowing us for the first time to present a complete quantum cryptanalysis framework for unforgeability. In particular, we prove how our definitions subsume previous ones while considering more fine-grained adversarial models, capturing the full spectrum of superposition attacks. The subtlety here resides in the characterisation of a forgery. We show that the strongest level of unforgeability, namely existential unforgeability, can only be achieved if only orthogonal to previously queried messages are considered to be forgeries. In particular, we present a non-trivial attack if any overlap between the forged message and previously queried ones is allowed. We further show that deterministic constructions can only achieve the weaker notion of unforgeability, that is selective unforgeability, against such restricted adversaries, but that selective unforgeability breaks if general quantum adversaries (capable of general superposition attacks) are considered. On the other hand, we show that PRF is sufficient for constructing a selective unforgeable classical primitive against full quantum adversaries. Moreover, we show similar positive results relying on Pseudorandom Unitaries (PRU) for quantum primitives. These results demonstrate the generality of our framework that could be applicable to other primitives beyond the cases analysed in this paper.

Quantum Physical Unclonable Functions: Possibilities and Impossibilities

Sat, 14 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are physical devices with unique behavior that are hard to clone. A variety of PUF schemes have been considered in theoretical studies as well as practical implementations of several security primitives such as identification and key generation. Recently, the inherent unclonability of quantum states has been exploited for defining (a partial) quantum analogue to classical PUFs (against limited adversaries). There are also a few proposals for quantum implementations of classical optical PUFs. However, none of these attempts provides a comprehensive study of Quantum Physical Unclonable Functions (QPUFs) with quantum cryptographic tools as we present in this paper. We formally define QPUFs, encapsulating all requirements of classical PUFs as well as introducing new ones inherent to the quantum setting such as testability. We develop a quantum game-based security framework for our analysis and define a new class of quantum attacks, called General Quantum Emulation Attack. This class of attacks exploits previously captured valid challenge-response pairs to emulate the action of an unknown quantum transformation on new input. We devise a concrete attack based on an existing quntum emulation algorithm and use it to show that a family of quantum cryptographic primitives that rely on unknown unitary transformations do not provide existential unforgeability while they provide selective unforgeability. Then, we express our results in the case of QPUF as an unknown unitary transformation.

A Comprehensive Analysis of Quantum E-voting Protocols

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Recent advances at Google, IBM, as well as a number of research groups indicate that quantum computers will soon be reality. Motivated by the ever more realistic threat quantum computers pose to existing classical cryptographic protocols, researchers have developed several schemes to resist “quantum attacks”. In particular, for electronic voting, several e-voting schemes relying on properties of quantum mechanics have been proposed. However, each of these proposals comes with a different and often not well-articulated corruption model, has different objectives, and is accompanied by security claims which are never formalized and are at best justified only against specific attacks. In this paper, we systematize and evaluate the security of suggested e-voting protocols based on quantum technology. We examine the claims of these works concerning privacy, correctness and verifiability, and if they are correctly attributed to the proposed protocols. In all non-trivial cases, we identified specific quantum attacks that violate these properties. We argue that the cause of these failures lies in the absence of formal security models and in a more general lack of reference to the existing cryptographic literature.