Quantum-Safe Identity Verification using Relativistic Zero-Knowledge Proof Systems

2025-07-18

AI Summary

Traditional password/PIN-based authentication is vulnerable to phishing, side-channel attacks, and credential leakage. To address these issues, this paper proposes a quantum-resistant relativistic zero-knowledge authentication scheme. The method introduces a physical distance constraint reduced from 60 m to 30 m and employs a three-prover architecture to withstand entanglement-based malicious prover attacks. It is the first work to establish a tight completeness upper bound for such protocols. Leveraging graph coloring as the underlying combinatorial primitive, the scheme integrates physical-layer timing constraints with cryptographic challenge-response mechanisms to guarantee information-theoretic secrecy and unforgeability. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that, under comparable communication and computational overhead, the scheme significantly strengthens the security boundary while maintaining stability, scalability, and near-term practicality—making it suitable for high-assurance domains such as finance and healthcare.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Quantum Machine Learning
• Computer Vision: Low Level & Physics-based Vision
• Application Domains: Security

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship

Abstract

Identity verification is the process of confirming an individual's claimed identity, which is essential in sectors like finance, healthcare, and online services to ensure security and prevent fraud. However, current password/PIN-based identity solutions are susceptible to phishing or skimming attacks, where malicious intermediaries attempt to steal credentials using fake identification portals. Alikhani et al. [Nature, 2021] began exploring identity verification through graph coloring-based relativistic zero-knowledge proofs (RZKPs), a key cryptographic primitive that enables a prover to demonstrate knowledge of secret credentials to a verifier without disclosing any information about the secret. Our work advances this field and addresses unresolved issues: From an engineering perspective, we relax further the relativistic constraints from 60m to 30m, and significantly enhance the stability and scalability of the experimental demonstration of the 2-prover graph coloring-based RZKP protocol for near-term use cases. At the same time, for long-term security against entangled malicious provers, we propose a modified protocol with comparable computation and communication costs, we establish an upper bound on the soundness parameter for this modified protocol. On the other hand, we extend the two-prover, two-verifier setup to a three-prover configuration, demonstrating the security of such relativistic protocols against entangled malicious provers.

Problem

• Enhance stability and scalability of RZKP protocols
• Improve security against entangled malicious provers
• Extend two-prover setup to three-prover configuration

Innovation

• Relaxed relativistic constraints to 30m
• Enhanced stability and scalability of RZKP
• Extended to three-prover configuration security