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Cryptanalysis of a quantum identity-based signature and its improvement

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Abstract

Digital signatures are one of the key cryptographic components for providing authenticity and non-repudiation. To circumvent the need of certificates, Shamir in 1984 introduced identity-based signature (IBS). Nearly all of the existing state-of-the-art IBS schemes are relying on the number-theoretic hardness assumptions. Unfortunately, these hard problems are insecure and face a threat in quantum world. Thus, it is high time to design and analyze IBS algorithms that can resist quantum attacks and provide long-term security. Quantum cryptography is one such technique to provide quantum-safe IBS. In this paper, we cryptanalyze the quantum cryptography-based IBS of Huang et al. (Huang et al. in Quantum Inf Process 22(1):36, 2022). We show that the design in (Huang et al. in Quantum Inf Process 22(1):36, 2022) is not secure against public key generator forgery attack, collusion attacks, and intercept and resend attacks. Next, we modify the design of (Huang et al. in Quantum Inf Process 22(1):36, 2022) and propose a new quantum IBS (namely qIBS) which is secure against the aforementioned attacks.

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Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were generated or analyzed to support this research.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by CEFIPRA CSRP Project No. 6701-1. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for providing their valuable suggestions and comments which helped us to improve the paper significantly.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, National Institute of Technology Warangal, Warangal, Telangana, 506004, India

    Y. Sreenivasa Rao

  2. Department of Mathematics, National Institute of Technology Jamshedpur, Jamshedpur, 831014, India

    Vikas Srivastava, Tapaswini Mohanty & Sumit Kumar Debnath

  3. Department of Mathematics, IIT Madras, Chennai, 600036, India

    Vikas Srivastava

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  1. Y. Sreenivasa Rao
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  2. Vikas Srivastava
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  3. Tapaswini Mohanty
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Contributions

Y.S.R., V.S. and T.M. were responsible for conceptualization, methodology writing, original draft preparation, visualization and investigation. Y.S.R. and S.K.D. did supervision and project management. All authors did reviewing and editing.

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Correspondence to Vikas Srivastava.

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Rao, Y.S., Srivastava, V., Mohanty, T. et al. Cryptanalysis of a quantum identity-based signature and its improvement. Quantum Inf Process 23, 318 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-024-04523-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-024-04523-6

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