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 d
eviate 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.
We report an experimental realization of an adaptive quantum state tomography protocol. Our method takes advantage of a Bayesian approach to statistical inference and is naturally tailored for adaptive strategies. For pure states we observe close to
1/N scaling of infidelity with overall number of registered events, while best non-adaptive protocols allow for $1/sqrt{N}$ scaling only. Experiments are performed for polarization qubits, but the approach is readily adapted to any dimension.
