The round-robin differential phase-shift quantum key distribution protocol provides a secure way to exchange private information without monitoring conventional disturbances and still maintains a high tolerance of noise, making it desirable for practical implementations of quantum key distribution. However, photon number resolving detectors are required to ensure that the detected signals are single photons in the original protocol. Here, we adopt the detector-decoy method and give the bounds to the fraction of detected events from single photons. Utilizing the advantages of the protocol, we provide a practical method of performing the protocol with desirable performances requiring only threshold single-photon detectors.
The round-robin differential phase-shift quantum key distribution protocol provides a secure way to exchange private information without monitoring conventional disturbances and still maintains a high tolerance of noise, making it desirable for practical implementations of quantum key distribution. However, photon number resolving detectors are required to ensure that the detected signals are single photons in the original protocol. Here, we adopt the detector-decoy method and give the bounds to the fraction of detected events from single photons. Utilizing the advantages of the protocol, we provide a practical method of performing the protocol with desirable performances requiring only threshold single-photon detectors.
In the original round-robin differential-phase-shift (RRDPS) quantum key distribution and its improved method, the photon-number-resolving detectors are must for the security. We present a RRDPS protocol with yes-no detectors only. We get the upper bounds of mutual information of Alice and Eve, and Bob and Eve, and the formula of key rate. Our main idea is to divide all counts into two classes, the counts due to the odd number photons of incident detectors and the counts due to the even number photons of incident detectors. The fact that the bit-flip error rate of the later class is certainly 50% makes it possible for us to perform a tightened estimation of the upper bound of the leakage information. The robustness of original RRDPS against source flaws such as side-channel attacks still holds for the RRDPS with yes-no detectors. The simulation results show that the key rate of RRDPS with yes-no detectors is close to that of RRDPS with photon-number-resolving detectors. Our results make the RRDPS protocol much more practical.
The security of quantum key distribution (QKD) relies on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, with which legitimate users are able to estimate information leakage by monitoring the disturbance of the transmitted quantum signals. Normally, the disturbance is reflected as bit flip errors in the sifted key; thus, privacy amplification, which removes any leaked information from the key, generally depends on the bit error rate. Recently, a round-robin differential-phase-shift QKD protocol for which privacy amplification does not rely on the bit error rate (Sasaki et al 2014 Nature 509 475) was proposed. The amount of leaked information can be bounded by the sender during the state-preparation stage and hence, is independent of the behavior of the unreliable quantum channel. In our work, we apply the tagging technique to the protocol and present a tight bound on the key rate and employ a decoy-state method. The effects of background noise and misalignment are taken into account under practical conditions. Our simulation results show that the protocol can tolerate channel error rates close to 50% within a typical experiment setting. That is, there is a negligible restriction on the error rate in practice.
The security of quantum key distribution (QKD) relies on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, with which legitimate users are able to estimate information leakage by monitoring the disturbance of the transmitted quantum signals. Normally, the disturbance is reflected as bit flip errors in the sifted key; thus, privacy amplification, which removes any leaked information from the key, generally depends on the bit error rate. Recently, a round-robin differential-phase-shift QKD protocol for which privacy amplification does not rely on the bit error rate [Nature 509, 475 (2014)] was proposed. The amount of leaked information can be bounded by the sender during the state-preparation stage and hence, is independent of the behaviour of the unreliable quantum channel. Considering the essence of this protocol, we present a tight bound on the key rate and employ a decoy-state method. The effects of background noise and misalignment are taken into account under practical conditions. Our simulation results show that the protocol can tolerate channel error rates of close to 50% within a typical experiment setting. That is, there is no restriction on the error rate in practice.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) allows the establishment of common cryptographic keys among distant parties. Many of the QKD protocols that were introduced in the past, involve the challenge of monitoring the signal disturbance over the communication line, in order to evaluate the information leakage to a potential eavesdropper. Recently, a QKD protocol that circumvents the need for monitoring signal disturbance, has been proposed and demonstrated in initial experiments. Here, we propose an improved version of this so-called round-robin differential phase-shifting (RRDPS) protocol, in which both time and phase degrees of freedom are utilized to enlarge the Hilbert-space dimensionality, without increasing experimental complexity or relaxing security assumptions. We derive the security proofs of the round-robin differential phase-time-shifting (RRDPTS) protocol in the collective attack scenario, and benchmark it against RRDPS for different experimental parameters. Furthermore, a proof-of-concept experiment of the RRDPTS protocol, using weak coherent pulses and decoy state method, is demonstrated over 80 km of fiber link. Our results show that the RRDPTS protocol can achieve higher secret key rate in comparison with the RRDPS, in the condition of high quantum bit error rate.
Photon number resolving detectors can enhance the performance of many practical quantum cryptographic setups.In this paper, we employ a simple method to estimate the statistics provided by such a photon number resolving detector using only a threshold detector together with a variable attenuator.This idea is similar in spirit to that of the decoy state technique, and is especially suited to those scenarios where only a few parameters of the photon number statistics of the incoming signals have to be estimated.As an illustration of the potential applicability of the method in quantum communication protocols, we use it to prove security of an entanglement-based quantum key distribution scheme with an untrusted source without the need for a squash model and by solely using this extra idea.In this sense, this detector decoy method can be seen as a different conceptual approach to adapt a single-photon security proof to its physical, full optical implementation.We show that in this scenario, the legitimate users can now even discard the double click events from the raw key data without compromising the security of the scheme, and we present simulations on the performance of the BB84 and the 6-state quantum key distribution protocols.
In recent years, round-robin-differential-phase-shift (RRDPS) quantum key distribution (QKD) has attracted great attention for its unique characteristics, i.e., the information leakage can be bounded without learning bit error rate. Though the RRDPS QKD has made a breakthrough, it is still a question of how RRDPS will perform with monitoring signal disturbance, e.g., decoy-state and error rate statistics are both used. Here, we present simulations to study RRDPS protocol while monitoring signal disturbance. To our excitement, when using the infinite decoy-states method, RRDPS protocol can outperform the commonly used Bennett and Brassard 1984 (BB84) protocol in terms of channel length under typical experimental parameters. In the case of finite decoy states, we find that only two decoy-states and one signal state are sufficient to obtain performance very close to the infinite decoy-states case. Our simulations prove that RRDPS is a competitive protocol in real-life situations.