No Arabic abstract
Security in quantum cryptography is continuously challenged by inventive attacks targeting the real components of a cryptographic setup, and duly restored by new counter-measures to foil them. Due to their high sensitivity and complex design, detectors are the most frequently attacked components. Recently it was shown that two-photon interference from independent light sources can be exploited to avoid the use of detectors at the two ends of the communication channel. This new form of detection-safe quantum cryptography, called Measurement-Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution (MDI-QKD), has been experimentally demonstrated, but with modest delivered key rates. Here we introduce a novel pulsed laser seeding technique to obtain high-visibility interference from gain-switched lasers and thereby perform quantum cryptography without detector vulnerabilities with unprecedented bit rates, in excess of 1 Mb/s. This represents a 2 to 6 orders of magnitude improvement over existing implementations and for the first time promotes the new scheme as a practical resource for quantum secure communications.
We report an experimental quantum key distribution that utilizes balanced homodyne detection, instead of photon counting, to detect weak pulses of coherent light. Although our scheme inherently has a finite error rate, it allows high-efficiency detection and quantum state measurement of the transmitted light using only conventional devices at room temperature. When the average photon number was 0.1, an error rate of 0.08 and effective quantum efficiency of 0.76 were obtained.
We consider the problem where a group of n nodes, connected to the same broadcast channel (e.g., a wireless network), want to generate a common secret bitstream, in the presence of an adversary Eve, who tries to obtain information on the bitstream. We assume that the nodes initially share a (small) piece of information, but do not have access to any out-of-band channel. We ask the question: can this problem be solved without relying on Eves computational limitations, i.e., without using any form of public-key cryptography? We propose a secret-agreement protocol, where the n nodes of the group keep exchanging bits until they have all agreed on a bit sequence that Eve cannot reconstruct with very high probability. In this task, the nodes are assisted by a small number of interferers, whose role is to create channel noise in a way that bounds the amount of information Eve can overhear. Our protocol has polynomial-time complexity and requires no changes to the physical or MAC layer of network devices. First, we formally show that, under standard theoretical assumptions, our protocol is information-theoretically secure, achieves optimal secret-generation rate for n = 2 nodes, and scales well to an arbitrary number of nodes. Second, we adapt our protocol to a small wireless 14-square-meter testbed; we experimentally show that, if Eve uses a standard wireless physical layer and is not too close to any of the nodes, 8 nodes can achieve a secret-generation rate of 38 Kbps. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first experimental demonstration of information-theoretic secret exchange on a wireless network at a rate beyond a few tens of bits per second.
This is a reply to the comment by Yuan et al. [arXiv:1009.6130v1] on our publication [arXiv:1008.4593].
This is a chapter on quantum cryptography for the book A Multidisciplinary Introduction to Information Security to be published by CRC Press in 2011/2012. The chapter aims to introduce the topic to undergraduate-level and continuing-education students specializing in information and communication technology.
Quantum cryptography is a new method for secret communications offering the ultimate security assurance of the inviolability of a Law of Nature. In this paper we shall describe the theory of quantum cryptography, its potential relevance and the development of a prototype system at Los Alamos, which utilises the phenomenon of single-photon interference to perform quantum cryptography over an optical fiber communications link.