We study a practical method to measure the shot noise in real time in continuous-variable quantum key distribution systems. The amount of secret key that can be extracted from the raw statistics depends strongly on this quantity since it affects in particular the computation of the excess noise (i.e., noise in excess of the shot noise) added by an eavesdropper on the quantum channel. Some powerful quantum hacking attacks relying on faking the estimated value of the shot noise to hide an intercept and resend strategy were proposed. Here, we provide experimental evidence that our method can defeat the saturation attack and the wavelength attack.
We study a practical method to measure the shot noise in real time in continuous-variable quantum key distribution systems. The amount of secret key that can be extracted from the raw statistics depends strongly on this quantity since it affects in particular the computation of the excess noise (i.e., noise in excess of the shot noise) added by an eavesdropper on the quantum channel. Some powerful quantum hacking attacks relying on faking the estimated value of the shot noise to hide an intercept and resend strategy were proposed. Here, we provide experimental evidence that our method can defeat the saturation attack and the wavelength attack.
The shot-noise unit (SNU) is a crucial factor for the practical security of a continuous-variable quantum key distribution system. In the most widely used experimental scheme, the SNU should be calibrated first and used as a constant during key distribution. Because the measurement result of quadrature is normalized with the calibration SNU but scaled with practical SNU, which could open loopholes for the eavesdropper to intercept the secret key. In this paper, we report a quantum hacking method to control the practical SNU by using the limited compensation rate for polarization drift. Since the polarization of local oscillator pulses is partially measured, the attack is implemented by manipulating the polarization of the local oscillator pulses without measurement when the system is running. The simulation and experiment results indicate that the practical SNU can be manipulated by the eavesdropper. By making the difference between the calibration and the practical SNU, the excess noise estimated by Alice and Bob could always be lower than the practice which is introduced by the eavesdropper and the distributed keys are not secure.
Recently, several practical attacks on continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CVQKD) were proposed based on faking the estimated value of channel excess noise to hide the intercept-and-resend eavesdropping strategy, including the local oscillator (LO) fluctuation, calibration, wavelength, and saturation attacks. However, the known countermeasures against all these practical attacks will inevitably increase the complexity of the implementation of CVQKD and affect its performance. We develop here an asynchronous countermeasure strategy without structural modifications of the conventional CVQKD scheme. In particular, two robust countermeasures are proposed by adding peak-valley seeking and Gaussian postselection steps in conventional data postprocessing procedure. The analysis shows that the peak-valley seeking method naturally make the schemes immune to all known types of calibration attacks even when Eve simultaneously performs wavelength or LO fluctuation attacks and exhibit simpler implementation and better performance than the known countermeasures. Meanwhile, since the Gaussian postselection is able to resist the saturation attacks, the proposed schemes are secure against all known types of practical attacks.
Abstract The shot-noise unit (SNU) is a crucial factor for the practical security of a continuous-variable quantum key distribution system. In the most widely used experimental scheme, the SNU should be calibrated first and acts as a constant during the key distribution. However, the SNU of a practical system is dependent on the various parameters of the local oscillator (LO), which can be controlled by the eavesdropper in the open channel. In this paper, we report a quantum hacking method to control the practical SNU by using the limited compensation rate of the polarization compensation. Since the compensation is only based on of the polarization measurement results of part of LO pulses, the polarization of other unmeasured pulses may not be compensated correctly, which can be utilized by the eavesdropper to control the practical SNU. The simulation and experiment results indicate that the practical SNU can be controlled by the eavesdropper. Thus, the eavesdropper can use the fact that the practical SNU is no longer equals to the calibrated one to control the excess noise and final key rate.
We identify and study a security loophole in continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CVQKD) implementations, related to the imperfect linearity of the homodyne detector. By exploiting this loophole, we propose an active side-channel attack on the Gaussian-modulated coherent-state CVQKD protocol combining an intercept-resend attack with an induced saturation of the homodyne detection on the receiver side (Bob). We show that an attacker can bias the excess noise estimation by displacing the quadratures of the coherent states received by Bob. We propose a saturation model that matches experimental measurements on the homodyne detection and use this model to study the impact of the saturation attack on parameter estimation in CVQKD. We demonstrate that this attack can bias the excess noise estimation beyond the null key threshold for any system parameter, thus leading to a full security break. If we consider an additional criterion imposing that the channel transmission estimation should not be affected by the attack, then the saturation attack can only be launched if the attenuation on the quantum channel is sufficient, corresponding to attenuations larger than approximately 6 dB. We moreover discuss the possible countermeasures against the saturation attack and propose a countermeasure based on Gaussian postselection that can be implemented by classical postprocessing and may allow one to distill the secret key when the raw measurement data are partly saturated.
An intercept-resend attack on a continuous-variable quantum-key-distribution protocol is investigated experimentally. By varying the interception fraction, one can implement a family of attacks where the eavesdropper totally controls the channel parameters. In general, such attacks add excess noise in the channel, and may also result in non-Gaussian output distributions. We implement and characterize the measurements needed to detect these attacks, and evaluate experimentally the information rates available to the legitimate users and the eavesdropper. The results are consistent with the optimality of Gaussian attacks resulting from the security proofs.
In the safety assessment of the actual CVQKD (continuous-variable quantum key distribution) system,the preparation measurement model is generally equivalent to the entanglement-based model,whose major drawback is that the shot noise variance is treated as a constant.As the attacks on the LO (local oscillator) from the Eve,the shot noise variance will change with LO.And in the process of safety analysis based on the shot noise variance calibration technology,there are loopholes in which the shot noise variance for calculating secret key rate is obtained by the linear relationship between the shot noise variance and the LO before distributing the quantum key.However,the shot noise variance is not accurate nor real-time.In the security analysis of system,all the noise parameters of the system are normalized to the shot noise variance.The Eve can reduce the shot noise variance by controlling the strength of LO,thus actual excess noise of system will increase.But legal communicating parties are still normalized based on previous larger shot noise variance,so that the excess noise of system is substantially underestimated.As a consequence,the Eve can obtain secret key information without attracting the attention of legal communicating parties by adopting some attacks, such as intercept-resend attack.Thus it is an essential factor for ensuring the system security to evaluate real-time shot noise variance accurately.In order to effectively resist the above mentioned attacks on the LO from the Eve,a scheme of CVQKD system based on real-time shot noise variance monitoring is presented to improve the security of CVQKD system.The shot noise variance calibration technology is adopted in this system.By adding the real-time shot noise variance monitoring modules to the primary CVQKD system,the real-time shot noise variance is assessed by the linear relationship between the shot noise variance and the LO.In the hardware system,independent clocks are adopted. Sampling in peak algorithm is applied to software system,and this effectively solves the problem that CVQKD system with LO clock source is at risk of shot noise variance calibration attack.The scheme prevents the hazards that the Eve changes previously calibrated linear relationship by regulating the pulse delay of the LO,and thus judges whether the system is safe through calculating the accurate and real-time secret key rate.The system can analyze the real-time security of quantum key distribution and display safety status of system.The experimental results show that this system can defend effectively the LO attacks from the Eve and improve the security performance of the CVQKD system.