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Top1. Introduction
Due to the extensive use of information and communication technology, protecting resources from unauthorized users are essential nowadays. Authentication plays a vital role in protecting resources from malicious attempts by attackers to breach the security. Most organizations depend on the security measures at the perimeter of network using firewalls, in order to secure their information technology (IT) infrastructure. Several authentication protocols have been designed and implemented to secure systems from unauthorized access. Entity authentication is used to safeguard digital devices from attacks like eavesdropping, man-in the middle attack, reply attack etc. Initially, password-based authentication protocol was developed. In this protocol, the password was used for authentication and password was sent as plaintext through the communication channel. This protocol suffered from replay attack, password guessing attack, and dictionary attacks, etc. Later on, Challenge-handshake authentication protocol was developed based on the challenge response paradigm. In this technique, a challenge contained a hash of a random string concatenated with the key using MD5 or SHA algorithms. When claimant got the challenge, then it sent the response to the verifier. Later, on the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) (Aboba et al., 2004), KERBEROS (Kohl & Neuman, 1993), RADIUS (Rigney et al., 2000), DIAMETER (Calhoun at al., 2003) protocol, zero knowledge-based entity authentication protocols were developed. The classical authentication schemes are based on hardness of the mathematical equation.
Due to the advent of high-performance computers and quantum computers, any security mechanism based on mathematical complexity could be broken easily. Hence, the quantum secure authentication protocol is the utmost requirement for the next decade to protect resources from attacks.
One time pad (OTP) is the classical cryptographic algorithm that is almost unbreakable if it is appropriately implemented. In OTP, the ciphertext is generated by using XORing of plaintext and shared OTP between entities. In this paper, the design of a proposed entity authentication protocol to secure authenticated data from quantum computer attacks is discussed.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 deals with related work; Section 3 describes the proposed quantum secure authentication protocol; Section 4 deals with security analysis of the proposed protocol, and finally, section 5 deals with the conclusion and future work.