QKD-Enhanced Cybersecurity Protocols

Abstract

Security of QKD is guaranteed by the quantum mechanics laws rather than unproven assumptions employed in computational cryptography. Unfortunately, the secret-key rates are way too low and transmission distances are limited. The post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is proposed as an alternative to QKD. However, the PQC protocols are based on conjecture that there are no polynomial time algorithms to break the PQC protocols. To overcome key challenges of both post-quantum cryptography and QKD, we propose to use the QKD only in initialization stage to set-up corresponding cybersecurity protocols. The proposed concept is applied to both computational security and PQC protocols. The proposed QKD-enhanced cybersecurity protocols are tolerant to attacks initiated by quantum computers.