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arXiv:1803.03915 · Chinese Journal of Electronics

Fair Efficiency Comparisons of Decoy‐State Quantum Key Distribution Protocols

Hongxin Li, Ming Yuan Gao, Xueping Yan, Bao Yan, Yu Han, Ling Shan, Zhi Ma

Published Mar 1, 2018• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Taking the schemes based on different formulas of secure key rate as examples, we give a fair comparison between typical protocols under Universal composable (UC) security frame. Through analyzing the relationship of security parameters in post-processing stage and final secure key rate, we achieve the unified quantification between protocols based on Gottesman-Lo-Lütkenhaus-Preskill (GLLP) formula and the ones under UC security. Based on the above research, the impact of different sending lengths and secure parameters on secure key rate is investigated. Besides, we analyze the conditions of fair comparison, and for the first time we give a fair comparison between the protocols based on GLLP formula and smooth entropy. By typical efficiency comparisons, we summarize the way for improving secure key rate in the light intensity choice and the single bit error rate estimation method.

DOI
10.1049/cje.2017.07.011

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Taking the schemes based on different formulas of secure key rate as examples, we give a fair comparison between typical protocols under Universal composable (UC) security frame. Through analyzing the relationship of security parameters in post-processing stage and final secure key rate, we achieve the unified quantification between protocols based on Gottesman-Lo-Lütkenhaus-Preskill (GLLP) formula and the ones under UC security. Based on the above research, the impact of different sending lengths and secure parameters on secure key rate is investigated. Besides, we analyze the conditions of fair comparison, and for the first time we give a fair comparison between the protocols based on GLLP formula and smooth entropy. By typical efficiency comparisons, we summarize the way for improving secure key rate in the light intensity choice and the single bit error rate estimation method.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) gradually has become a crucial element of practical secure communication. In different scenarios, the security analysis of genuine QKD systems is complicated. A universal secret key rate calculation method, used for realistic factors such as multiple degrees of freedom encoding, asymmetric protocol structures, equipment flaws, environmental noise, and so on, is still lacking. Based on the correlations of statistical data, we propose a security analysis method without restriction on encoding schemes. This method makes a trade-off between applicability and accuracy, which can effectively analyze various existing QKD systems. We illustrate its ability by analyzing source flaws and a high-dimensional asymmetric protocol. Results imply that our method can give tighter bounds than the Gottesman-Lo-Lütkenhaus-Preskill (GLLP) analysis and is beneficial to analyze protocols with complex encoding structures. Our work has the potential to become a reference standard for the security analysis of practical QKD.
Since the single photon is easy to attenuate and be disturbed, its key generation rate and transmission distance in quantum communication systems are generally limited. In contrast, weak coherent pulse (WCP) and heralded single photon source (HSPS) exhibit higher feasibility than the single photon source in quantum key distributions (QKD). We compare the performances of QKD using these two kinds of photon sources and decoy state method, incorporating data-postprocessing methods including the Lütkenhaus scheme and Gottesman-Lo-Lütkenhaus- Preskill (GLLP) scheme. Simulation results indicate that QKD using HSPS can transmit longer distance than using WCP with lower overall quantum bit error rate (QBER) at the same transmission distance, albeit with relatively low key generation rate.
We simulate quantum key distribution (QKD) experimental setups and give out some improvement for QKD procedures. A new data post-processing protocol is introduced, mainly including error correction and privacy amplification. This protocol combines the ideas of GLLP and the decoy states, which essentially only requires to turn up and down the source power. We propose a practical way to perform the decoy state method, which mainly follows the idea of Lo's decoy state. A new data post-processing protocol is then developed for the QKD scheme with the decoy state. We first study the optimal expected photon number mu of the source for the improved QKD scheme. We get the new optimal mu=O(1) comparing with former mu=O(eta), where eta is the overall transmission efficiency. With this protocol, we can then improve the key generation rate from quadratic of transmission efficiency O(eta2) to O(eta). Based on the recent experimental setup, we obtain the maximum secure transmission distance of over 140 km.
The security of quantum-key-distribution system is analyzed using the decoy state protocol with two weak decoy states and one signal state. The comparison is based on the key generation rate as a function of distance for two types of decoy states: the vacuum and a weak decoy state, asymptotically approaching the theoretical limit of the most general type of decoy protocol, one-decoy-state protocol. We studied the two-decoy-state protocol in connection with the intensity of signal state, and the gain of signal states, the overall quantum bit error rate, the gain of single-photon states and the error rate of single-photon states and arrived at the optimal condition which maximizes the key generation rate.
By simulating four quantum key distribution (QKD) experiments and analyzing one decoy-state QKD experiment, we compare two data postprocessing schemes based on security against individual attack by L\"utkenhaus, and unconditional security analysis by Gottesman-Lo-L\"utkenhaus-Preskill. Our results show that these two schemes yield close performances. In QKD, since unconditional security is highly sought after, we conclude that one is better off considering unconditional security, rather than restricting to individual attacks.
The privacy amplification term, of which the lower bound needs to be estimated with the decoy-state method, plays a positive role in the secure key rate formula for decoy-state quantum key distribution. In previous work, the yield and the bit error rate of single-photon state are estimated separately to gain this lower bound. In this work, we for the first time take the privacy amplification term as a whole to consider this lower bound. The mathematical description for the correlation between the yield and the bit error rate of single-photon state is given with just two unknown variables. Based on this, we obtain the global estimation of this lower bound for both BB84 protocol and measurement-device-independent protocol. The results of numerical simulation show that the global estimation can significantly improve the performance of quantum key distribution.