No Arabic abstract
Coherent-one-way quantum key distribution (COW-QKD), possessing the simple experimental setup and the ability against the photon-number-splitting attack, has been implemented in various experiments and commercial applications. However, recent works have proved that current COW-QKD with key rate scaling linearly with transmittance is totally insecure under the zero-error attack. This conclusion leads to a crucial consequence that all the current attempts for practicalization are in vain. To solve this pending issue, here we conduct a minor revision on original COW-QKD while maintaining the original experimental setup as well as the simplicity of implementation. By more precisely estimating the amount of leaked information, we provide an explicit unconditional secure key rate which scales with $0.7%$ of the bound that quadratically scales with transmittance. Our work provides a revised COW-QKD which guarantees the availability of the current implementations of COW-QKD within 100 km and establishes the theoretical foundations for further application.
We prove the security of the 1984 protocol of Bennett and Brassard (BB84) for quantum key distribution. We first give a key distribution protocol based on entanglement purification, which can be proven secure using methods from Lo and Chaus proof of security for a similar protocol. We then show that the security of this protocol implies the security of BB84. The entanglement-purification based protocol uses Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes, and properties of these codes are used to remove the use of quantum computation from the Lo-Chau protocol.
High-dimensional quantum key distribution (QKD) provides ultimate secure communication with secure key rates that cannot be obtained by QKD protocols with binary encoding. However, so far the proposed protocols required additional experimental resources, thus raising the cost of practical high-dimensional systems and limiting their use. Here, we analyze and demonstrate a novel scheme for fiber-based arbitrary-dimensional QKD, based on the most popular commercial hardware for binary time bins encoding. Quantum state transmission is tested over 40 km channel length of standard single-mode fiber, exhibiting a two-fold enhancement of the secret key rate in comparison to the binary Coherent One Way (COW) protocol, without introducing any hardware modifications. This work holds a great potential to enhance the performance of already installed QKD systems by software update alone.
We prove the security of theoretical quantum key distribution against the most general attacks which can be performed on the channel, by an eavesdropper who has unlimited computation abilities, and the full power allowed by the rules of classical and quantum physics. A key created that way can then be used to transmit secure messages such that their security is also unaffected in the future.
The work by Christandl, Konig and Renner [Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 020504 (2009)] provides in particular the possibility of studying unconditional security in the finite-key regime for all discrete-variable protocols. We spell out this bound from their general formalism. Then we apply it to the study of a recently proposed protocol [Laing et al., Phys. Rev. A 82, 012304 (2010)]. This protocol is meaningful when the alignment of Alices and Bobs reference frames is not monitored and may vary with time. In this scenario, the notion of asymptotic key rate has hardly any operational meaning, because if one waits too long time, the average correlations are smeared out and no security can be inferred. Therefore, finite-key analysis is necessary to find the maximal achievable secret key rate and the corresponding optimal number of signals.
In this paper we present finite-key security analysis for quantum key distribution protocol based on weak coherent (in particular phase-coded) states using a fully quantum asymptotic equipartition property technique. This work is the extension of the proof for non-orthogonal states on the coherent states. Below we consider two types of attacks each of them maximizes either Alice-Eve or Eve-Bob mutual information. The cornerstone of this paper is that we do assume the possibility of crucial intercept-resend attack based on errorless unambiguous state discrimination measurement. We demonstrate that Holevo bound always gives the highest mutual information between Alice and Eve regardless particular kind of isometry. As the main result we present the dependence of the extracted secret key length. As the example we implement the proposed analysis to the subcarrier wave quantum key distribution protocol.