A Smart Card-Based Three-Party Quantum Key Distribution Protocol

The quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols become the trend research in the computer security field today because those are very strong to prevent the eavesdropping during communication domain. In addition, an existence of the third party as the Trust Center (TC) presents the higher security level and the more effective key distribution such as 3QKDPMA and 3PAQKD-TB. The TC has responsibilities to construct the session key and to authenticate the user on a communication session. Moreover, the TC should have the high-security level to assure all communications done under the secure condition. The 3QKDPMA and 3PAQKD-TB provide the effective method for creating the session key. However, the basic QKD protocol mentioned in this paper do not provide the advanced user authentication. It is because TC only maintains the user's secret key table which is used to authenticate each legal user. To improve the basic QKD protocol, we propose a new scheme for QKD by elaborating the 3PAQKD-TB with the smart card secure user authentication. Finally, it is a lightweight computation approach in order to achieve more efficiently to the basic QKD protocol by using elliptic curve cryptography.