Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Quantum Cryptography
Error Tolerance
Information Security
Noise-Tolerant Quantum Tokens for MAC
🤖 AI Summary
Existing quantum message authentication codes (Q-MACs) exhibit insufficient robustness against realistic noise in quantum channels, particularly under high quantum bit error rates (QBERs).
Method: This paper proposes the first delegatable quantum signature token system—termed TMAC—that tolerates QBERs up to 14%. It leverages standard BB84-state encoding and post-quantum one-way functions to construct a lightweight, hardware-friendly quantum tokenization-based signing mechanism. Security is formally established under the existential unforgeability against chosen-message attacks (EUF-CMA) model.
Contribution/Results: Compared with prior constructions, TMAC significantly relaxes fidelity requirements on quantum devices, eliminates the need for complex quantum error correction, and achieves strong experimental compatibility and practical deployability. It establishes a novel paradigm for quantum identity authentication and message integrity assurance in high-noise environments.
📝 Abstract
Message Authentication Code, or MAC, is a well-studied cryptographic primitive that is used to authenticate communication between two parties who share a secret key. A Tokenized MAC or TMAC is a related cryptographic primitive, introduced by Ben-David & Sattath (QCrypt’17), which allows limited signing authority to be delegated to third parties via the use of single-use quantum signing tokens. These tokens can be issued using the secret key, such that each token can be used to sign at most one document. We provide an elementary construction for TMAC based on BB84 states. Our construction can tolerate up to 14% noise, making it the first noise-tolerant TMAC construction. The simplicity of the quantum states required for our construction, combined with its noise tolerance, make it practically more feasible than the previous TMAC construction. The TMAC presented is existentially unforgeable against adversaries with signing and verification oracles (i.e., it is analogous to EUF-CMA security for MAC), assuming that post-quantum one-way functions exist.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
BB84 Quantum State
Error-tolerant Tokenized Message Authentication Code (TMAC)
Quantum-resistant Cryptography
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