Papers for

cryptographic service providers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Zero knowledge proof protects quantum network routes without revealing paths

Certifying Hidden Paths: Scalable Topology Assurance for QKD Networks

Abstract: Large-scale Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) networks rely on trusted repeaters, making the security properties of the selected communication path an essential part of end-to-end assurance. At the same time, network operators may be unwilling to disclose their internal topology. We present a topology-certification mechanism that lets a provider prove in zero knowledge that policy-compliant routes between two endpoints exist, without disclosing the routes in an individual presentation. Our main idea is to certify nodes and edges independently using multi-message signatures, rather than signing the complete graph as one object. For a route chosen in advance, proof size and cryptographic proving and verification work depend on its positions and attributes, independently of the overall network size, whereas route discovery and certification have separate graph-dependent costs. The construction hides the actual route length up to a public bound and sketches extensions to node-disjoint routes and monotonic additions within a graph epoch. We give a formal security model and conditional proofs of unforgeability and graph hiding for a generic construction. For a BBS-based construction, presentation-size estimates remain below $300$\,KiB at $\ell=m=n=50$, and measured generation and verification times remain below $400$\,ms at $\ell=64$ and $m=n=8$.

Thu 8 OctCryptography and Security
The gist
Quantum networks use special keys for secure communication, but the paths these keys travel must be trusted. The authors show a way for network providers to prove that safe paths exist without revealing the paths themselves. They do this by certifying parts of the network separately and proving this information using cryptography, so the network’s layout stays private. Their approach works efficiently even on larger networks and hides details like the route length.
Open → 2610.11513v1