arXiv subjects

Mohamed Shaban

Publications and source records attributed to Mohamed Shaban.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Experimental Protocol Fingerprinting in Quantum Networks via Physical Layer Side Channel Analysis

Quantum communication is a key enabler of next-generation networks, leveraging quantum entanglement to enable a new class of information exchange. While prior work has focused on the theoretical analysis of communication protocols, their exposure to physical layer side channel analysis remains largely unexplored. In classical systems, side channel analysis has been shown to reveal sensitive information without accessing the underlying data, raising the question of whether similar risks exist in quantum networks. In this work, we investigate whether different quantum communication protocols exhibit distinguishable signatures that can be inferred through passive side channel observations. We consider a threat model in which an observer accesses only a fraction of the optical signal without directly measuring the encoded quantum states. Under this setting, we experimentally examine four representative protocols, namely entanglement distribution, quantum gate sequences, heralded quantum key distribution, and quantum identity authentication, realized on a polarization entangled photon link. Observable physical layer features, including single photon detection statistics and optical power measurements, are collected and used to construct protocol fingerprints. We develop a data-driven framework for protocol identification based on these observations. Our results show that protocol identity can be inferred with accuracy reaching up to 96% under 30:70 sampling configuration/optical tapping, while remaining distinguishable at 10:90 with accuracy ranging from 70-89%. Bell inequality measurements confirm that the sampling/tapping process preserves entanglement, validating the non-destructive nature of the observation model. These findings demonstrate that side channel analysis can expose protocol-level information without disrupting quantum correlations, introducing new security considerations.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Experimental Side Channel Analysis of Protocol Stages in Quantum Identity Authentication

Quantum networks can enable distributed computing and sensing. To realize these capabilities securely, quantum identity authentication is essential. Without authentication at the quantum layer, malicious repeaters may retain entanglement instead of performing swapping, enabling man-in-the-middle attacks (MitM) between communicating parties. Authentication mitigates this threat by embedding authentication qubits within data qubits at positions and bases based on a secret key shared a priori. While prior work analyzes security and MitM detection guarantees, physical layer side channel analysis remains unexplored. If an attacker infers protocol stages, it can avoid authentication qubits and extract data qubits, rendering authentication ineffective. To this end, we carry out experimental studies using a quantum communication testbed. A beam splitter is used to tap a portion of the optical signal, allowing the observer to collect side channel data without disrupting the quantum state. We evaluate two sampling settings, where 30% or 10% of the signal is diverted. The collected side channel data includes photon arrival timing and optical power data obtained using a single-photon detector and a power meter. Using this dataset, we extract and engineer features that capture both timing dynamics and signal intensity variations. We then train machine learning models to classify protocol stages based solely on side channel observations. Our results show that protocol-stage inference is feasible with high accuracy, reaching 98% (F1-score 97%) at 30% sampling and 96% (F1-score 94%) at 10% sampling. These findings reveal an overlooked vulnerability and highlight the need for robust designs against side channel inference attacks.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Towards Quantum Network Performance Metrics: Challenges and Demonstration

As quantum networks move toward practical deployment, standardized performance monitoring becomes essential. This article proposes a structured monitoring framework for quantum networks with performance metrics, including quality (e.g., entanglement fidelity, QBER, loss, dark count rate), throughput and latency (e.g., entanglement rate, waiting time), timing (e.g., coincidence window, production and coincidence jitter), and exogenous factors (e.g., temperature, humidity, vibrations). These measurements enable real-time observability, benchmarking, and control, supporting use cases such as fault diagnosis, adaptive timing, and entanglement routing. Additionally, we implement a non-invasive prototype environmental monitoring system integrated with the quantum network infrastructure at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, demonstrating practical feasibility of live data collection and alert generation. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges of real-time monitoring and the trade-offs between observability and system performance. This work establishes a foundation for developing advanced quantum network monitoring systems and lays the groundwork for future autonomous control and quantum software-defined networking.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Flexible Bit-Truncation Memory for Approximate Applications on the Edge

Bit truncation has demonstrated great potential to enable run-time quality-power adaptive data storage, thereby optimizing the power/energy efficiency of approximate applications and supporting their deployment in edge environments. However, existing bit-truncation memories require custom designs for a specific application. In this paper, we present a novel bit-truncation memory with full adaptation flexibility, which can truncate any number of data bits at run time to meet different quality and power trade-off requirements for various approximate applications. The developed bit-truncation memory has been applied to two representative data-intensive approximate applications: video processing and deep learning. Our experiments show that the proposed memory can support three different video applications (including luminance-aware, content-aware, and region-of-interest-aware) with enhanced power efficiency (up to 47.02% power savings) as compared to state-of-the-art. In addition, the proposed memory achieves significant (up to 51.69%) power savings for both baseline and pruned lightweight deep learning models, respectively, with a low implementation cost (2.89% silicon area overhead).

cs.AR↗

arXiv2024

SPARQ: Efficient Entanglement Distribution and Routing in Space-Air-Ground Quantum Networks

In this paper, a space-air-ground quantum (SPARQ) network is developed as a means for providing a seamless on-demand entanglement distribution. The node mobility in SPARQ poses significant challenges to entanglement routing. Existing quantum routing algorithms focus on stationary ground nodes and utilize link distance as an optimality metric, which is unrealistic for dynamic systems like SPARQ. Moreover, in contrast to the prior art that assumes homogeneous nodes, SPARQ encompasses heterogeneous nodes with different functionalities further complicates the entanglement distribution. To solve the entanglement routing problem, a deep reinforcement learning (RL) framework is proposed and trained using deep Q-network (DQN) on multiple graphs of SPARQ to account for the network dynamics. Subsequently, an entanglement distribution policy, third-party entanglement distribution (TPED), is proposed to establish entanglement between communication parties. A realistic quantum network simulator is designed for performance evaluation. Simulation results show that the TPED policy improves entanglement fidelity by 3% and reduces memory consumption by 50% compared with benchmark. The results also show that the proposed DQN algorithm improves the number of resolved teleportation requests by 39% compared with shortest path baseline and the entanglement fidelity by 2% compared with an RL algorithm that is based on long short-term memory (LSTM). It also improved entanglement fidelity by 6% and 9% compared with two state-of-the-art benchmarks. Moreover, the entanglement fidelity is improved by 15% compared with DQN trained on a snapshot of SPARQ. Additionally, SPARQ enhances the average entanglement fidelity by 23.5% compared with existing networks spanning only space and ground layers.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Secured Quantum Identity Authentication Protocol for Quantum Networks

Quantum Internet signifies a remarkable advancement in communication technology, harnessing the principles of quantum entanglement and superposition to facilitate unparalleled levels of security and efficient computations. Quantum communication can be achieved through the utilization of quantum entanglement. Through the exchange of entangled pairs between two entities, quantum communication becomes feasible, enabled by the process of quantum teleportation. Given the lossy nature of the channels and the exponential decoherence of the transmitted photons, a set of intermediate nodes can serve as quantum repeaters to perform entanglement swapping and directly entangle two distant nodes. Such quantum repeaters may be malicious and by setting up malicious entanglements, intermediate nodes can jeopardize the confidentiality of the quantum information exchanged between the two communication nodes. Hence, this paper proposes a quantum identity authentication protocol that protects quantum networks from malicious entanglements. Unlike the existing protocols, the proposed quantum authentication protocol does not require periodic refreshments of the shared secret keys. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol can detect malicious entanglements with a 100% probability after an average of 4 authentication rounds.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Secure and Efficient Entanglement Distribution Protocol for Near-Term Quantum Internet

Quantum information technology has the potential to revolutionize computing, communications, and security. To fully realize its potential, quantum processors with millions of qubits are needed, which is still far from being accomplished. Thus, it is important to establish quantum networks to enable distributed quantum computing to leverage existing and near-term quantum processors into more powerful resources. This paper introduces a protocol to distribute entanglements among quantum devices within classical-quantum networks with limited quantum links, enabling more efficient quantum teleportation in near-term hybrid networks. The proposed protocol uses entanglement swapping to distribute entanglements efficiently in a butterfly network, then classical network coding is applied to enable quantum teleportation while overcoming network bottlenecks and minimizing qubit requirements for individual nodes. Experimental results show that the proposed protocol requires quantum resources that scale linearly with network size, with individual nodes only requiring a fixed number of qubits. For small network sizes of up to three transceiver pairs, the proposed protocol outperforms the benchmark by using 17% fewer qubit resources, achieving 8.8% higher accuracy, and with a 35% faster simulation time. The percentage improvement increases significantly for large network sizes. We also propose a protocol for securing entanglement distribution against malicious entanglements using quantum state encoding through rotation. Our analysis shows that this method requires no communication overhead and reduces the chance of a malicious node retrieving a quantum state to 7.2%. The achieved results point toward a protocol that enables a highly scalable, efficient, and secure near-term quantum Internet.

quant-ph↗