Enhanced quantum signature scheme using quantum amplitude amplification operators

Basma Elias; Ahmed Younes

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0258091

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionDecember 17, 2020
3 Feb 2021 Decision Letter - M. Usman Ashraf, Editor PONE-D-20-39685 Enhanced quantum signature scheme using quantum amplitude amplification operators PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Elias, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 18 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, M. Usman Ashraf, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2.We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly Reviewer #2: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: N/A ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The paper describes an extension towards the quantum signature scheme based on Grover's quantum search algorithm related diffusion / partial diffusion / amplitude amplification operators along the lines of the publication of A. Younes "Enhancing the security of quantum communication by hiding the message in a superposition" from 2011 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2010.09.017). The current submission however does not offer a sufficient conceptual advancement from the mentioned paper to justify its publication in PLOS ONE. The main concept of the paper has been described previously in its major part, and thus both the core of the proposed QDS along with its security analysis have been to a high extent repeated after the previous result largely unchanged on a conceptual level. The paper does not provide sufficient disclosement of the fact that in terms of the protocol's conceptual layer it is mainly repeating the idea of a previous paper of one of the co-authors from 2011. Hence in its current formulation the proposed protocol lacks the novelty justifying its PLOS ONE publication. If the paper is to be reconsidered for the PLOS ONE publication, a significant (major) revision would be required, first in-detail addressing the issue of basing the proposal on the 2011 paper (including indications of which parts of the protocol are essentially repeated) and secondly clearly explaining the conceptual progress from this previous paper that could justify significant novelty required for the publication. Furthermore the security analysis of the protocol in its current formulation is not very convincing and should be extended to justify the claims made on the security of the protocol. The soundness of the concept should also be elaborated on. Furthermore issue of quantum memory requirement for the proposed QDS should be discussed in view of the recent progress with memory-less QDS. Reviewer #2: The authors investigate a quantum signature scheme via a trusted center (TC), based on "scrambling" information using Grover-like inversion about the mean operators. The signature scheme consists of 3 phases: preparation, signing, and verifying. During the preparation phase, Alice and Bob establish a shared secret key via a QKD scheme run through the TC; Alice also sends the message to Bob via a public channel. In the signing phase, Alice chooses one of three possible encoding methods to "scramble" the qubits in her message: hiding, non-hiding, and Bell-like encoding, then apply the encoding to each of her qubits. Finally, the verification scheme consist of Bob comparing the message received via the public channel with the one obtained via decoding, and agreeing whether they are the same or not. The authors then show that their scheme is non-forgeable, provides non-repudiation, and is secure. Finally, the authors compare their scheme with previous ones in the literature, in terms of used resources (qubits) and eavesdrop detection efficiency. They show a slight improvement in the latter (from 75% to ~91%, compared to Ref. 13). In my opinion, the paper is a bit hard to read and lacks sufficient rigour. In particular, the following are unclear: 1. Line 78, there should be a 3rd qubit there in state \|1> 2. I assume the message to be signed is a S-qubit quantum state (if yes, can this be arbitrary or only a product state?). Can the authors clarify that. E.g., on line 100, "Alice sends the message to the receiver on a public channel" -> "... public quantum channel" 3. On line 111, what do the authors mean by "QKD protocol with size 3S qubits"? Is 3S the length of the established key? In that case, the QKD requires significantly more than 3S qubits to distill a 3S-length key. 4. Regarding the QKD, it is not clear from the text that it has to go through the TC (as shown in the Fig. 1). Can Alice and Bob perform the QKD without the TC? 5. Sign is wrong on line 87, the minus should appear on the other 3 states 6. During the verification scheme, the authors mention that the public message (I assume string of received qubits) is "compared" against the decoded one received via the channel. This implies the receiver must have access to a long-lived quantum memory, which should be included in the resource analysis of Table 2. 7. Can the authors comment more on the role of the TC and the attack model? What exactly can Eve intercept/modify? 8. The encoding procedure during the signing phase is not very clear. I urge the authors to write the encoding as a set of 3 quantum circuits, one for each case, which will make the procedure more clear for the reader. In light of the above comments, and since the current paper level of innovation is a bit less than PLOS ONE's standards, I recommend a soft rejection, unless the authors significantly re-write it, address all the criticisms above, and clearly emphasize the novel approaches in comparison with the known literature. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. 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Revision 1
21 Mar 2021 Author Response Reviewer #1: The paper describes an extension towards the quantum signature scheme based on Grover's quantum search algorithm related diffusion / partial diffusion / amplitude amplification operators along the lines of the publication of A. Younes "Enhancing the security of quantum communication by hiding the message in a superposition" from 2011 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2010.09.017). The current submission however does not offer a sufficient conceptual advancement from the mentioned paper to justify its publication in PLOS ONE. The main concept of the paper has been described previously in its major part, and thus both the core of the proposed QDS along with its security analysis have been to a high extent repeated after the previous result largely unchanged on a conceptual level. The paper does not provide sufficient disclosement of the fact that in terms of the protocol's conceptual layer it is mainly repeating the idea of a previous paper of one of the co-authors from 2011. Hence in its current formulation the proposed protocol lacks the novelty justifying its PLOS ONE publication. If the paper is to be reconsidered for the PLOS ONE publication, a significant (major) revision would be required, first in-detail addressing the issue of basing the proposal on the 2011 paper (including indications of which parts of the protocol are essentially repeated) and secondly clearly explaining the conceptual progress from this previous paper that could justify significant novelty required for the publication. Author response: Thank you very much for the comment. The paper has been reorganized by adding section 2 to separate the work done in ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2010.09.017) from the contribution of the paper. Furthermore the security analysis of the protocol in its current formulation is not very convincing and should be extended to justify the claims made on the security of the protocol. The soundness of the concept should also be elaborated on. Author response: Thank you very much for the comment. The security analysis of the protocol has been discussed and explained in page 11, lines from 222 to 236. Furthermore issue of quantum memory requirement for the proposed QDS should be discussed in view of the recent progress with memory-less QDS. Author response: Thank you very much for the comment. The issue of quantum memory requirement is discussed and explained in page 12 and 13, lines from 259 to 271. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Reviewer #2: 1. Line 78, there should be a 3rd qubit there in state \|1> Author response: Thank you very much for the comment. 2. I assume the message to be signed is a S-qubit quantum state (if yes, can this be arbitrary or only a product state?). Can the authors clarify that. E.g., on line 100, "Alice sends the message to the receiver on a public channel" -> "... public quantum channel" Author response: Thank you very much for your valuable comment that enables us to enhance and clarify the paper. The announcement of the message is explained in page 6, lines 115 and 116. 3. On line 111, what do the authors mean by "QKD protocol with size 3S qubits"? Is 3S the length of the established key? In that case, the QKD requires significantly more than 3S qubits to distill a 3S-length key. Author response: Thank you very much for your valuable comment that enables us to clarify the paper. The requirement of the QKD protocol is discussed and explained in page 6, lines from 117 to 120. 4. Regarding the QKD, it is not clear from the text that it has to go through the TC (as shown in the Fig. 1). Can Alice and Bob perform the QKD without the TC? Author response: Thank you very much for the comment. In the scheme, TC sends a secret key to Alice to sign the message (page 6, line 117) then TC verifies the signature using the shared key, then TC sends the signed message to Bob based on a shared secret key that Bob sends to TC (page 9, line 173). If Alice and Bob perform the QKD without TC, TC cannot verify the signed message that Alice sends because TC does not have a secret key and cannot sign the message again to send it to Bob. 5. Sign is wrong on line 87, the minus should appear on the other 3 states Author response: Thank you very much for the comment. We would like to inform you that the equation is correct, and the minus sign is on state \|00> only because Grover’s operator is applied on state \|00> (no perfect superposition and no oracle for marking). 6. During the verification scheme, the authors mention that the public message (I assume string of received qubits) is "compared" against the decoded one received via the channel. This implies the receiver must have access to a long-lived quantum memory, which should be included in the resource analysis of Table 2. Author response: Thank you very much for your valuable comment that enables us to clarify the paper. The announcement of the message is explained in page 6, line 115 and 116. The issue of quantum memory requirement is discussed and explained in page 12 and 13, lines from 259 to 271. The need of the long-lived quantum memory is included in the resource analysis of Table 2. 7. Can the authors comment more on the role of the TC and the attack model? What exactly can Eve intercept/modify? Author response: Thank you very much for the comment. The security analysis of the protocol has been discussed and explained in page 11, lines from 222 to 236. 8. The encoding procedure during the signing phase is not very clear. I urge the authors to write the encoding as a set of 3 quantum circuits, one for each case, which will make the procedure more clear for the reader. Author response: Thank you very much for your valuable comment that enables us to clarify the paper. The cases of the signing phase are explained and discussed in page 8, lines from 150 to 167. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewers.docx* https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258091.r002
15 Jun 2021 Decision Letter - M. Usman Ashraf, Editor PONE-D-20-39685R1 Enhanced quantum signature scheme using quantum amplitude amplification operators PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Elias, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 30 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, M. Usman Ashraf, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #2: Partly ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #2: N/A ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #2: I appreciate that the authors addressed some of my concerns, and clarify some of the material in the paper. My only worry is that the current paper is not innovative enough in comparison with Ref. 12. I appreciate that the authors introduced Sec. 2, in which they succinctly describe Ref. 12, however I find the progress made in the current manuscript to be relatively incremental compared to Ref. 12, and therefore does not meet the PONE standards of novelty. For this reasons, unfortunately I cannot recommend the publication. ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258091.r003
Revision 2
1 Jul 2021 Author Response Reviewer #2: I appreciate that the authors addressed some of my concerns, and clarify some of the material in the paper. My only worry is that the current paper is not innovative enough in comparison with Ref. 12. I appreciate that the authors introduced Sec. 2, in which they succinctly describe Ref. 12, however I find the progress made in the current manuscript to be relatively incremental compared to Ref. 12, and therefore does not meet the PONE standards of novelty. Author response: Thank you very much for the comment. The paper has been reorganized by adding section 5 to discuss the innovation done in our work compared with Ref. 12. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewers.docx* https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258091.r004
20 Sep 2021 Decision Letter - M. Usman Ashraf, Editor Enhanced quantum signature scheme using quantum amplitude amplification operators PONE-D-20-39685R2 Dear Dr. Elias, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, M. Usman Ashraf, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): The basic idea of the research is although very innovative. After the 2nd revision, I can see improvement in the paper. However, my decision is to accept the paper. Reviewers' comments: Authors have addressed all the comments very carefully. I recommend to accept the paper in its present format. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258091.r005
Formally Accepted
27 Sep 2021 Acceptance Letter - M. Usman Ashraf, Editor PONE-D-20-39685R2 Enhanced quantum signature scheme using quantum amplitude amplification operators Dear Dr. Elias: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. M. Usman Ashraf Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258091.r006

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