arXiv subjects

Wenhua Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Wenhua Gao.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Drop-in KEM Replacement for Client Signatures in Post-Quantum SSH

The transition to post-quantum cryptography is reshaping the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol for remote administration. Post-quantum key exchange has been deployed in OpenSSH and is being standardized, while SSH authentication largely remains a signature-replacement effort. This path preserves the familiar public-key credential model, but inherits the size and computation overhead of post-quantum signatures, which can increase latency, traffic, and server-side load. KEM-based authentication offers a natural alternative to this signature-centric path, and SSH makes this especially attractive at the user-authentication layer, which is method-extensible, separated from transport-layer key exchange and host-key authentication, and already protected by the established channel. We present a drop-in KEM-based user-authentication method for SSH that replaces client public-key signatures with a session-bound challenge-response proof. The method fits into SSH's existing user-authentication framework, preserving the public-key credential model and enabling incremental deployment alongside existing methods. We provide a reduction-based security argument in the post-quantum ACCE framework, implement the design in OpenSSH using liboqs, and evaluate it under representative RTTs, TCP initial-window settings, and post-quantum migration configurations. Our results show that KEM-based authentication is competitive with compact signature-based authentication under representative network settings, while reducing median handshake latency by up to about 10% against large-signature hybrid baselines. The advantages are clearer when post-quantum signatures stress transmission or computation: median latency under small TCP initial windows falls by up to 7.3% versus ML-DSA and 17.9% versus SLH-DSA, while server-side online cryptographic cost is 59.1% lower than that for ML-DSA in the same NIST category.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Quantum Identity-Based Encryption from the Learning with Errors Problem

In order to prevent eavesdropping and tampering, the network security protocols use a handshake with an asymmetric cipher to establish a session-specific shared key with which further communication is encrypted using a symmetric cipher. The commonly used asymmetric algorithms include public key encryption, key exchange and identity-based encryption(IBE). However, the network security protocols based on classic identity-based encryption do not have perfect forward security. To solve the problem, we construct the first quantum IBE (QIBE) scheme based on the learning with errors problem, and prove that our scheme is fully secure under the random oracle. Moreover, we construct the quantum circuit of our QIBE scheme and give an estimate of the quantum resource of our circuit including the numbers of Hadamard gate, phase gate, T gate, CNOT gate and the total qubits used in the circuit, and conclude that the quantum resources required by our scheme increase linearly with the number of bits of the encrypted quantum plaintext. Our scheme exhibits the following advantages: (i) The classic key generation center (KGC) system still can be used for our QIBE scheme to generate and distribute the secret identity keys so that the cost can be reduced when the scheme is implemented. The reason why the classic KGC can be used is that the public and private keys are in the form of classic bits. (ii) The network security protocols using a handshake with our QIBE scheme can provide perfect forward security. In our scheme, the ciphertext is transmitted in the form of a quantum state that is unknown to the adversary and therefore cannot be copied and stored. Thus, in the network security protocols based on our QIBE construction, the adversary cannot decrypt the previous quantum ciphertext to threat the previous session keys even if the identity secret key is threatened.

cs.CR↗