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Register a new userHacking the quantum key distribution system by exploiting the avalanche transition region of single photon detectors
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Avalanche photodiode based single photon detectors, as crucial and practical components, are widely used in quantum key distribution (QKD) systems. For effective detection, most of these SPDs are operated in the gated mode, in which the gate is added to obtain high avalanche gain, and is removed to quench the avalanche. The avalanche transition region (ATR) is a certain existence in the process of adding and removing the gate. We first experimentally investigate the characteristic of the ATR, including in the commercial SPD and high-speed SPD, and then propose an ATR attack to control the detector. In the experiment of hacking the plug-and-play QKD system, Eve only introduces less than 0.5 % quantum bit error rate, and almost leaves no traces of her presence including the photocurrent and afterpulse probability. We finally give possible countermeasures against this attack.
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Quantum key distribution (QKD) has been proved to be information-theoretically secure in theory. Unfortunately, the imperfect devices in practice compromise its security. Thus, to improve the security property of practical QKD systems, a commonly used method is to patch the loopholes in the existing QKD systems. However, in this work, we show an adversarys capability of exploiting the imperfection of the patch itself to bypass the patch. Specifically, we experimentally demonstrate that, in the detector under test, the patch of photocurrent monitor against the detector blinding attack can be defeated by the pulse illumination attack proposed in this paper. We also analyze the secret key rate under the pulse illumination attack, which theoretically confirmed that Eve can conduct the attack to learn the secret key. This work indicates the importance of inspecting the security loopholes in a detection unit to further understand their impacts on a QKD system. The method of pulse illumination attack can be a general testing item in the security evaluation standard of QKD.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) can generate secure key bits between remote users with quantum mechanics. However, the gap between the theoretical model and practical realizations gives eavesdroppers opportunities to intercept secret key. The most insidious attacks, known as quantum hacking, are the ones with no significant discrepancy of the measurement results using side-channel loopholes of QKD systems. Depicting full-time-scale characteristics of the quantum signals, the quantum channel, and the QKD system can provide legitimate users extra capabilities to defeat malicious attacks. For the first time, we propose the method exploring temporal ghost imaging (TGI) scheme to perceive quantum hacking with temporal fingerprints and experimentally verify its validity. The scheme presents a common approach to promote QKDs practical security from a new perspective of signals and systems.
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.
The security of quantum communication using a weak coherent source requires an accurate knowledge of the sources mean photon number. Finite calibration precision or an active manipulation by an attacker may cause the actual emitted photon number to deviate from the known value. We model effects of this deviation on the security of three quantum communication protocols: the Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol without decoy states, Scarani-Acin-Ribordy-Gisin 2004 (SARG04) QKD protocol, and a coin-tossing protocol. For QKD, we model both a strong attack using technology possible in principle, and a realistic attack bounded by todays technology. To maintain the mean photon number in two-way systems, such as plug-and-play and relativistic quantum cryptography schemes, bright pulse energy incoming from the communication channel must be monitored. Implementation of a monitoring detector has largely been ignored so far, except for ID Quantiques commercial QKD system Clavis2. We scrutinize this implementation for security problems, and show that designing a hack-proof pulse-energy-measuring detector is far from trivial. Indeed the first implementation has three serious flaws confirmed experimentally, each of which may be exploited in a cleverly constructed Trojan-horse attack. We discuss requirements for a loophole-free implementation of the monitoring detector.
Two time-reversal quantum key distribution (QKD) schemes are the quantum entanglement based device-independent (DI)-QKD and measurement-device-independent (MDI)-QKD. The recently proposed twin field (TF)-QKD, also known as phase-matching (PM)-QKD, has improved the key rate bound from $Oleft( eta right )$ to $Oleft( sqrt {eta} right )$ with $eta$ the channel transmittance. In fact, TF-QKD is a kind of MDI-QKD but based on single-photon detection. In this paper, we propose a different PM-QKD based on single-photon entanglement, referred to as single-photon entanglement-based phase-matching (SEPM)-QKD, which can be viewed as a time-reversed version of the TF-QKD. Detection loopholes of the standard Bell test, which often occur in DI-QKD over long transmission distances, are not present in this protocol because the measurement settings and key information are the same quantity which is encoded in the local weak coherent state. We give a security proof of SEPM-QKD and demonstrate in theory that it is secure against all collective attacks and beam-splitting attacks. The simulation results show that the key rate enjoys a bound of $Oleft( sqrt {eta} right )$ with respect to the transmittance. SEPM-QKD not only helps us understand TF-QKD more deeply, but also hints at a feasible approach to eliminate detection loopholes in DI-QKD for long-distance communications.
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