Quantum Anonymous Communication Network

Abstract

Nowadays the quantum computation which is based on quantum mechanics has been proven to be a serious threat against the security of the well-used public key cryptosystem (e g RSA) Precisely the quantum computer has the ability of the powerful parallel process where this feature causes the cryptosystems which are based on the difficulty of mathematic problems being cracked in polynomial time [1] That inspires more research of the quantum cryptography to resolve the issue with several proposed applications such as quantum key distribution (QKD) quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) and quantum secret sharing (QSS) and therefore the property of the quantum cryptography gradually attracts more focus in the field of the information security Furthermore the concept of the quantum network has been provided The purpose of the network is to communicate between the distant participants where the participants need to send the message with the help from relays or routers because the distance makes them unable to transmit directly In the quantum network especially distributing the entangled state between the distant participants is one of the core issues since the distance causes the quantum energy decreasing and additionally it may give an eavesdropper and the untrusted relay the opportunity to operate Man-in-the-Middle attack or obtain any useful information during the transmission In addition the anonymity is also a significant issue for information security Apart from protecting the privacy of the message the anonymity tends to hide the identity of the sender or the receiver In that case the feature of anonymity can be implemented in some applications in the classical cryptography which require the anonymity like voting sending email auction and so on Recently the onion routing (Tor) [2] becomes the well-known protocol which provides the anonymity for the initiator (sender) and the service provider with the help of several onion routers Besides because of the onion encryption/decryption method the transmitted message is untraceable preventing from others to track the path to find the initiator Based on the above discussion this thesis presents a distributed quantum network (DQN) with the untrusted relays in order to safely share the entanglement between each participant in long distance without the threat from Man-in-the-Middle attack Moreover two quantum anonymous environments called quantum onion routing (QOR) and quantum hidden service (QHS) are also presented which include the advantages of the quantum cryptography and the features of the onion routing In the first anonymous environment unlike the conventional onion routing an initiator can simultaneously share keys among the multiple routers with an efficient way and then anonymously sends the message to a public service provider On the other hand the second one allows both initiator and the service provider to be anonymous

Date of Award	2014 Aug 27
Original language	English
Supervisor	Tzone-Lih Hwang (Supervisor)