Subject: [Qirg] security in network operations

From: Rodney Van Meter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2019 17:35:03 +0900

The bad news is that the simplest protocols for monitoring the quality of network links can be manipulated by a single hijacked to repeater to cause network management protocols to declare a set of links DOWN and create an artificial partition of the network.  So controlling a single repeater gives you power that exceeds what you could achieve by hijacking a single Internet router, ignoring hacks to the routing protocols such as BGP hijacking.  (A quantum repeater would be vulnerable to exactly the same set of routing problems, but we’re looking for the delta in capabilities here.)

The good news is that application of a cryptographically secure choice of which entangled states to dedicate to link or connection monitoring and which to use for customer traffic, like the eavesdropper detection in QKD, is good enough to mitigate the problem.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2058-9565/aac11f/meta <https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2058-9565/aac11f/meta>

We also earlier created a taxonomy of possible attack points.
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss2015/ndss-2015-sent-programme/classification-quantum-repeater-attacks/ <https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss2015/ndss-2015-sent-programme/classification-quantum-repeater-attacks/>

As far as I’m aware, those are the only two things looking at security of the network operation itself, as opposed to integration of security into applications.

—Rod

Rodney Van Meter
Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies
Keio University, Japan
[email-masked]