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Reexamination of arbitrated quantum signature: the impossible and the possible

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Abstract

As a new model for signing both quantum and classical messages, the arbitrated quantum signature (AQS) protocols have recently attracted a lot of attentions. In this paper, we analyze their security from an important security aspect—the receiver’s forgery of the signature, and provide a detailed proof of the fact that the attempt to design an improved optimal encryption used in AQS cannot prevent the receiver’s forgery attack unless some assistant security strategies are introduced. In order to show that, we firstly summarize an explicit formalization of the general AQS model and propose the necessary and sufficient conditions against the receiver’s forgery attack. Then a contradiction of them has been pointed out. In order to complete our security analysis, we verify that the AQS protocols for signing classic messages are still susceptible to the receiver’s forgery. Finally, some assistant security strategies are provided to recover the security.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by NSFC (Grant Nos. 61103210, 61272057, 61202434, 61170270, 61100203, 61003286, 61121061), NCET (Grant No. NCET-10-0260), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (Grant Nos. 4112040, 4122054), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant Nos. 2011YB01, 2012RC0612).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China

    Ke-Jia Zhang, Su-Juan Qin, Ting-Ting Song & Qi Su

  2. Beijing Electronic Science and Technology Institute, Beijing, 100070, China

    Ying Sun

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  1. Ke-Jia Zhang
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  2. Su-Juan Qin
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Correspondence to Ke-Jia Zhang.

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Zhang, KJ., Qin, SJ., Sun, Y. et al. Reexamination of arbitrated quantum signature: the impossible and the possible. Quantum Inf Process 12, 3127–3141 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-013-0589-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-013-0589-6

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