Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) has been attracting researchers that it would provide provable security to distribute secret keys since its birth in 1984. Since 2005, the trace distance between an ideal quantum state and an actually distributed state has been employed to evaluate its security level, and the trace distance was given an interpretation that it would be a maximum failure probability in distributing perfectly secure keys. However, in 2009, H. P. Yuen criticized that the trace distance would not have such an interpretation. Since then, O. Hirota, K. Kato, and T. Iwakoshi have been warning to make people pay attention to Yuen's criticisms. In 2015, T. Iwakoshi precisely explained why Yuen has been correct. In 2016, Yuen himself published a paper to explain the potentially unsolved problems in QKD. This study precisely explains the most important problems given in Yuen's paper, and gives recent topics around QKD and other quantum cryptographic protocols.
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) has been attracting researchers that it would provide provable security to distribute secret keys since its birth in 1984. Since 2005, the trace distance between an ideal quantum state and an actually distributed state has been employed to evaluate its security level, and the trace distance was given an interpretation that it would be a maximum failure probability in distributing perfectly secure keys. However, in 2009, H. P. Yuen criticized that the trace distance would not have such an interpretation. Since then, O. Hirota, K. Kato, and T. Iwakoshi have been warning to make people pay attention to Yuen's criticisms. In 2015, T. Iwakoshi precisely explained why Yuen has been correct. In 2016, Yuen himself published a paper to explain the potentially unsolved problems in QKD. This study precisely explains the most important problems given in Yuen's paper, and gives recent topics around QKD and other quantum cryptographic protocols.
In 2005, trace distance between an ideal quantum state to be distributed and an actual quantum state distributed was introduced as a valid security measure of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) by R. Renner et al., then it has been perceived that the trace can be interpreted as a maximum failure probability of QKD. While such a perspective has been widely accepted, H. P. Yuen and O. Hirota have been warning that such an interpretation is not correct since 2009. The author of this study has been giving questions on the interpretation of the trace distance based on their criticisms since QIT30 in May 2014, and has been proposing Yuen's idea to evaluate the security of QKD by the probability for the attacker to guess the correct key. However, the author could not give the guessing probability concretely. In this study, the author explains how to derive the average guessing probability for the attacker, where its result equals to Yuen's derivation firstly seen in 2010. From this result, one will see the problems with the maximum failure probability interpretation of the trace distance clearly. This study also explains the indistinguishability advantage interpretation is also invalid.
In 2007, it was found that Known-Plaintext-Attack would reveal whole the string of the distributed key by Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) when the part of the plaintext was known to the eavesdropper, Eve, under the mutual information security criterion between Eve and legitimate users, Alice and Bob. To overcome, the trace distance criterion was introduced in the paper that the distance between the distributed quantum state and the ideal quantum state with Eve’s quantum system decoupled from the quantum systems shared by Alice and Bob. On the other hand, Shor and Preskill proved in 2000 that entanglement-based QKDs are equivalent to prepare-and-measure QKDs, such as the first QKD, BB84. Their proof employed the mutual information criterion, therefore M. Koashi applied Shor-Preskill approach to the trace distance criterion in 2009. However, H. P. Yuen started criticisms on the security of QKDs from 2009, then completed his criticisms in 2016. He warned the security of QKDs are not sufficient. Furthermore, the trace distance would not provide “universal composability”, which is supposed to guarantee Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) keys. He also proposed a new security criterion “Bit-Error-Rate (BER) guarantee,” to evaluate the BER in the decoded message by Eve with her key close to the correct key. In this work, the author explains Yuen’s criticisms and shows an example of the BER guarantee on BB84. Furthermore, the study revisits whether Shor-Preskill security proof approach really worked.
It is claimed in the many papers that a trace distance (d) guarantees the universal composition security in quantum key distribution (QKD). In this introduction paper, at first, it is explicitly explained what is the main misconception in the claim of the unconditional security for QKD theory. In general terms, the cause of the misunderstanding on the security claim is the Lemma in the paper of Renner. It suggests that the generation of the perfect random key is assured by the probability (1 − d), and its failure probability is d. Thus, it concludes that the generated key provides the perfect random key sequence when the protocol suceeds. So the QKD provides perfect secrecy to the one time pad. This is the reason for the composition claim. However, the quantity of the trace distance (or variational distance) is not the probability for such an event. If d is not small enough, always the generated key sequence is not uniform. Now one needs the reconstruction of the evaluation of the trace distance if one wants to use it. One should first go back to the indistinguishability theory in the computational complexity based, and to clarify the meaning of the value of the variational distance. In addition, the same analysis for the information theoretic case is necessary. The recent serial papers by H.P.Yuen have given the answer on such questions. In this paper, we show more concise description of Yuen’s theory, and clarify that the recent upper bound theories for the trace distance by Tomamichel et al and Hayashi et al are constructed based on the reasoning of Renner and it is unsuitable as the analysis for information theoretic security. Finally, we introduce a macroscopic quantum communication with different principle to replace Q-bit QKD.
This study will test an interpretation in quantum key distribution (QKD) that trace distance between the distributed
quantum state and the ideal mixed state is a maximum failure probability of the protocol. Around 2004, this
interpretation was proposed and standardized to satisfy both of the key uniformity in the context of universal
composability and operational meaning of the failure probability of the key extraction. However, this proposal has not
been verified concretely yet for many years while H. P. Yuen and O. Hirota have thrown doubt on this interpretation
since 2009. To ascertain this interpretation, a physical random number generator was employed to evaluate key
uniformity in QKD. In this way, we calculated statistical distance which correspond to trace distance in quantum theory
after a quantum measurement is done, then we compared it with the failure probability whether universal composability
was obtained. As a result, the degree of statistical distance of the probability distribution of the physical random numbers
and the ideal uniformity was very large. It is also explained why trace distance is not suitable to guarantee the security in
QKD from the view point of quantum binary decision theory.
It is claimed in the many papers that a trace distance: d guarantees the universal composition security in quantum key distribution (QKD) like BB84 protocol. In this introduction paper, at first, it is explicitly explained what is the main misconception in the claim of the unconditional security for QKD theory. In general terms, the cause of the misunderstanding on the security claim is the Lemma in the paper of Renner. It suggests that the generation of the perfect random key is assured by the probability (1-d), and its failure probability is d. Thus, it concludes that the generated key provides the perfect random key sequence when the protocol is success. So the QKD provides perfect secrecy to the one time pad. This is the reason for the composition claim. However, the quantity of the trace distance (or variational distance) is not the probability for such an event. If d is not small enough, always the generated key sequence is not uniform. Now one needs the reconstruction of the evaluation of the trace distance if one wants to use it. One should first go back to the indistinguishability theory in the computational complexity based, and to clarify the meaning of the value of the variational distance. In addition, the same analysis for the information theoretic case is necessary. The recent serial papers by H.P.Yuen have given the answer on such questions. In this paper, we show more concise description of Yuen's theory, and clarify that the upper bound theories for the trace distance by Tomamichel et al and Hayashi et al are constructed by the wrong reasoning of Renner and it is unsuitable as the security analysis. Finally, we introduce a new macroscopic quantum communication to replace Q-bit QKD.
This study will test an interpretation in quantum key distribution (QKD) that trace distance between the distributed quantum state and the ideal mixed state is a maximum failure probability of the protocol. Around 2004, this interpretation was proposed and standardized to satisfy both of the key uniformity in the context of universal composability and operational meaning of the failure probability of the key extraction. However, this proposal has not been verified concretely yet for many years while H. P. Yuen and O. Hirota have thrown doubt on this interpretation since 2009. To ascertain this interpretation, a physical random number generator was employed to evaluate key uniformity in QKD. In this way, we calculated statistical distance which correspond to trace distance in quantum theory after a quantum measurement is done, then we compared it with the failure probability whether universal composability was obtained. As a result, the degree of statistical distance of the probability distribution of the physical random numbers and the ideal uniformity was very large. It is also explained why trace distance is not suitable to guarantee the security in QKD from the view point of quantum binary decision theory.