No Arabic abstract
Device-independent quantum key distribution protocols allow two honest users to establish a secret key with minimal levels of trust on the provider, as security is proven without any assumption on the inner working of the devices used for the distribution. Unfortunately, the implementation of these protocols is challenging, as it requires the observation of a large Bell-inequality violation between the two distant users. Here, we introduce novel photonic protocols for device-independent quantum key distribution exploiting single-photon sources and heralding-type architectures. The heralding process is designed so that transmission losses become irrelevant for security. We then show how the use of single-photon sources for entanglement distribution in these architectures, instead of standard entangled-pair generation schemes, provides significant improvements on the attainable key rates and distances over previous proposals. Given the current progress in single-photon sources, our work opens up a promising avenue for device-independent quantum key distribution implementations.
Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) can eliminate all detector side-channel loopholes and has shown excellent performance in long-distance secret keys sharing. Conventional security proofs, however, require additional assumptions on sources and that can be compromised through uncharacterized side channels in practice. Here, we present a general formalism based on reference technique to prove the security of MDI-QKD against any possible sources imperfection and/or side channels. With this formalism, we investigate the asymptotic performance of single-photon sources without any extra assumptions on the state preparations. Our results highlight the importance of transmitters security.
Device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD) is the art of using untrusted devices to distribute secret keys in an insecure network. It thus represents the ultimate form of cryptography, offering not only information-theoretic security against channel attacks, but also against attacks exploiting implementation loopholes. In recent years, much progress has been made towards realising the first DIQKD experiments, but current proposals are just out of reach of todays loophole-free Bell experiments. Here, we significantly narrow the gap between the theory and practice of DIQKD with a simple variant of the original protocol based on the celebrated Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) Bell inequality. By using two randomly chosen key generating bases instead of one, we show that our protocol significantly improves over the original DIQKD protocol, enabling positive keys in the high noise regime for the first time. We also compute the finite-key security of the protocol for general attacks, showing that approximately 1E8 to 1E10 measurement rounds are needed to achieve positive rates using state-of-the-art experimental parameters. Our proposed DIQKD protocol thus represents a highly promising path towards the first realisation of DIQKD in practice.
The measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) protocol plays an important role in quantum communications due to its high level of security and practicability. It can be immune to all side-channel attacks directed on the detecting devices. However, the protocol still contains strict requirements during state preparation in most existing MDI-QKD schemes, e.g., perfect state preparation or perfectly characterized sources, which are very hard to realize in practice. In this letter, we investigate uncharacterized MDI-QKD by utilizing a three-state method, greatly reducing the finite-size effect. The only requirement for state preparation is that the state are prepared in a bidimensional Hilbert space. Furthermore, a proof-of-principle demonstration over a 170 km transmission distance is achieved, representing the longest transmission distance under the same security level on record.
Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) provides us a powerful approach to resist all attacks at detection side. Besides the unconditional security, people also seek for high key generation rate, but MDI-QKD has relatively low key generation rate. In this paper, we provide an efficient approach to increase the key generation rate of MDI-QKD by adopting multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs) of single photons to generate keys. Compared with other high-dimension MDI-QKD protocols encoding in one DOF, our protocol is more flexible, for our protocol generating keys in independent subsystems and the detection failure or error in a DOF not affecting the information encoding in other DOFs. Based on above features, our MDI-QKD protocol may have potential application in future quantum communication field.
Device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD) guarantees the security of a shared key without any assumptions on the apparatus used, provided that the observed data violate a Bell inequality. Such violation is challenging experimentally due to channel losses and photo-detection inefficiencies. Here we describe a realistic DIQKD protocol based on interaction between light and spins stored in cavities, which allows a heralded mapping of polarisation entanglement of light onto the spin. The spin state can subsequently be measured with near unit efficiency. Heralding alleviates the effect of channel loss, and as the protocol allows for local heralding, the spin decay is not affected by the communication time between the parties, making Bell inequality violation over an arbitrary distance possible. We compute the achievable key rates of the protocol, based on recent estimates of experimentally accessible parameter values and compare to the other known DIQKD protocol, which is entirely optical. We find significant improvements in terms of key bits per source use. For example we gain about five orders of magnitude over a distance of 75km, for realistic parameter values.