Establishing security of quantum key distribution without monitoring disturbance

Masato Koashi

doi:10.1117/12.2197813

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13 October 2015 Establishing security of quantum key distribution without monitoring disturbance

Masato Koashi

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Proceedings Volume 9648, Electro-Optical and Infrared Systems: Technology and Applications XII; and Quantum Information Science and Technology; 96480Y (2015) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2197813
Event: SPIE Security + Defence, 2015, Toulouse, France

Abstract

In conventional quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols, the information leak to an eavesdropper is estimated through the basic principle of quantum mechanics dictated in the original version of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The amount of leaked information on a shared sifted key is bounded from above essentially by using information-disturbance trade-off relations, based on the amount of signal disturbance measured via randomly sampled or inserted probe signals. Here we discuss an entirely different avenue toward the private communication, which does not rely on the information disturbance trade-off relations and hence does not require a monitoring of signal disturbance. The independence of the amount of privacy amplification from that of disturbance tends to give it a high tolerance on the channel noises. The lifting of the burden of precise statistical estimation of disturbance leads to a favorable finite-key-size effect. A protocol based on the novel principle can be implemented by only using photon detectors and classical optics tools: a laser, a phase modulator, and an interferometer. The protocol resembles the differential-phase-shift QKD protocol in that both share a simple binary phase shift keying on a coherent train of weak pulses from a laser. The difference lies in the use of a variable-delay interferometer in the new protocol, which randomly changes the combination of pulse pairs to be superposed. This extra randomness has turned out to be enough to upper-bound the information extracted by the eavesdropper, regardless of how they have disturbed the quantum signal.

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Masato Koashi "Establishing security of quantum key distribution without monitoring disturbance", Proc. SPIE 9648, Electro-Optical and Infrared Systems: Technology and Applications XII; and Quantum Information Science and Technology, 96480Y (13 October 2015); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2197813

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