LICA: Making Quantum Incorrect-Plaintext Attack Detectable in Data Sharing Protocol

Abstract

In Incorrect-Plaintext Attacks (IPA), a malicious Data Owner (DO) compromises system security by encrypting incorrect plaintext, while a malicious Data User (DU) undermines system fairness by falsely claiming decryption failure even when the plaintext is valid. Both security and fairness vulnerabilities can be further amplified by adversaries with quantum computing. However, currently, no existing data sharing scheme can detect such quantum IPA, making it unexplored. This paper proposes LICA, a lattice-based IBE (Identity-Based Encryption) scheme with commitment assistance to detect quantum IPA in data sharing. LICA can identify if a ciphertext is encrypted from the specified plaintext and public key. It leverages the hardness of lattice problems to achieve quantum resistance. Commitment binding the encryption random parameters prevents DU from forging valid verification proofs. Then we present a new LICA-based Data Sharing Protocol (LICADS). Upon suspected quantum IPA, a trusted arbitration authority initiates a probabilistic challenge with the DO and collects evidence from the DO and DU. Then the arbitration authority identifies the malicious party using LICA and signatures to apply penalties. LICA is not only quantum-resistant but also formally proven to achieve commitment security and zero-knowledge proof security, which enables privacy protection during the verification process. Meanwhile, LICADS is the first data sharing protocol capable of detecting quantum IPA. We formally prove that LICA satisfies commitment correctness, verification correctness, binding, privacy preservation, unforgeability and pq-IND-sID-CPA security, and that LICADS achieves fairness, ensuring that any malicious party cannot evade punishment while honest parties are never penalized. We evaluate related schemes in terms of computational overhead, communication overhead, smart contract latency, and consensus efficiency. Experimental results show that LICADS incurs computational overhead comparable to existing schemes and roughly an order-of-magnitude higher communication overhead (about 45 KB under the Module-LWE instantiation versus 4–6 KB). We regard this as a worthwhile trade-off, since LICADS is the only scheme that detects quantum IPA.