Cryptanalysis of Quantum Secure Direct Communication Protocol with Mutual Authentication Based on Single Photons and Bell States

Abstract: Recently, Yan et al. proposed a quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol with authentication using single photons and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs (Yan et al., CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, 63(3), 2020). In this work, we show that the QSDC protocol is not secure against intercept-and-resend attack and impersonation attack. An eavesdropper can get the full secret message by applying these attacks. We propose a modification of this protocol, which defeats the above attacks along with all the familiar attacks.