We report an experimental implementation of free-space quantum secure direct communication based on single photons. The quantum communication scheme uses phase encoding, and the asymmetric Mach–Zehnder interferometer is optimized so as to automatically compensate phase drift of the photons during their transitions over the free-space medium. At a 16 MHz pulse repetition frequency, an information transmission rate of 500 bps over a 10 m free space with a mean quantum bit error rate of 0.49 % ± 0.27 % is achieved. The security is analyzed under the scenario that Eve performs the collective attack for single-photon state and the photon number splitting attack for multi-photon state in the depolarizing channel. Our results show that quantum secure direct communication is feasible in free space.
We report an experimental implementation of free-space quantum secure direct communication based on single photons. The quantum communication scheme uses phase encoding, and the asymmetric Mach–Zehnder interferometer is optimized so as to automatically compensate phase drift of the photons during their transitions over the free-space medium. At a 16 MHz pulse repetition frequency, an information transmission rate of 500 bps over a 10 m free space with a mean quantum bit error rate of 0.49 % ± 0.27 % is achieved. The security is analyzed under the scenario that Eve performs the collective attack for single-photon state and the photon number splitting attack for multi-photon state in the depolarizing channel. Our results show that quantum secure direct communication is feasible in free space.
Robust quantum transmission is driving a new paradigm in space-ground quantum networking. Although phase encoding has been widely adopted in terrestrial fiber channels, it has long been considered unsuitable for free-space quantum communication. Here, we demonstrate phase-encoded quantum communication over 1400 m of urban free space. The system maintained stable operation for nearly one hour, achieving 99.07% interference visibility and an average quantum bit error rate of 2.38%. The free-space quantum states were directly coupled into the fiber and transmitted over an additional 10 km, confirming seamless interoperability across different media. We further show that turbulence-induced phase drifts between successive picosecond pulses can be effectively compensated. A cascaded-link model and numerical simulations indicate feasibility over free-space distances exceeding 30 km, underscoring the potential for satellite-to-ground quantum links. This work establishes the viability of phase encoding in free-space quantum networks, simplifying cross-medium integration and enabling compatibility with existing classical infrastructures.
In response to the demand for identity authentication in quantum secure direct communication, this paper proposes a quantum secure direct communication scheme based on a mixture of single photon and Bell state, by combining the bidirectional identity authentication. Before communication begins, both parties share a series of secret information to prepare a series of single photon and Bell state particles. Encoding four single photons and four Bell states yields eight types of encoded information, followed by identity authentication. The first step in identity authentication is to use a single photon to verify the legitimacy of the receiver. If the error exceeds the given threshold, it indicates the presence of eavesdropping. Otherwise, the channel is safe. Then, Bell state particles are used to verify the legitimacy of the sender, and the threshold is also used to determine whether there is eavesdropping. The present method is the same as previous one. If the error rate is higher than the given threshold, it indicates the existence of third-party eavesdropping. Otherwise, it indicates that the channel is secure. As for the specific verification method, it will be explained in detail in the article. Afterwards, Bell state particles are mixed with a single photon as a transmission carrier, and eavesdropping detection particles are added whenever the quantum state is sent. However, once the eavesdropper intercepts the transmitted particles, owing to incomplete information obtained, the eavesdropper is unable to recover the original information, and the eavesdropping behavior will be immediately detected, thus terminating communication. In this scheme, single photon and Bell states are fully utilized, and hybrid communication can effectively improve transmission efficiency, encoding capability, and quantum bit utilization. Security analysis shows that this scheme can resist common external and internal attacks such as interception/measurement replay attacks, auxiliary particle attacks, and identity impersonation attacks. The analysis of efficiency and encoding capacity shows that the transmission efficiency of this scheme is 1, the encoding capacity is 3 bits per state, and the quantum bit utilization rate is 1. Compared with other schemes, this scheme has significant advantages because it uses different particles for bidirectional authentication, making it more difficult for attackers to crack, and thus it has higher security than traditional schemes.
By studying the properties of the mixture of Bell state particles and single photons,in the paper we design a quantum code scheme with high coding capacity,and propose a novel quantum secure direct communication protocol with high transmission efficiency.Alice prepares Bell state particles and single photons,and divides Bell state particles into two sequences SA and SB.SB is sent to Bob for the first security check through using quantum correlation properties of particles.When the check result shows that the quantum channel is safe,by using the designed quantum code scheme, Alice encodes her classical message on the mixed quantum state sequence of Bell sequence SA and single photon sequence SS.Then,some single photons that are used for security check are re-inserted randomly into the encoded sequence,and the order of particles is rearranged to ensure checking Eve's attack.Alice sends the new sequence to Bob.Bob delays and receives it.And then,the quantum channel conducts the second-time security check.The transmission error rate is calculated,and if the error rate is lower than the tolerance threshold,the channel is safe.Bob decodes and reads Alice's message.The first security check is to determine whether quantum channel is safe.The second security check is to test whether there are eavesdroppers during information transmission.Safety analysis is done by applying the quantum information theory for the proposed protocol.The error rate introduced by Eve and the amount of information by Eve are calculated.It is shown that this pro-tocol can effectively resist measurement-resend attack,intercept-resend attack, auxiliary particle attack,denial of service attack and Trojan attack.Among them,auxiliary particle attack is analyzed in detail.The transmission efficiency and coding capacity are also analyzed.The transmission efficiency is 2,the quantum bit rate is 1,and the coding capacity is that a quantum state can encode three bits of classical messages.We also compare the proposed protocol with many existing popular protocols in the sense of efficiency,e.g.,Ping-Pong protocol, Deng F G et al.'s two-step and one-pad-time quantum secure direct communication protocol,Wang J et al.'s quantum secure direct communication protocol based on entanglement swapping and Quan D X et al.'s one-way quantum secure direct communication protocol based on single photon.It is proved that this proposed protocol has higher transmission efficiency.In addition,neither complex U operation nor entanglement swapping is used,and implementation process is simplified.However,this protocol is devoted to theoretical research of quantum secure direct communication.There are still some difficulties in the practical application.For example,the storage technology of quantum states is not mature at present.It is not easy to prepare and measure Bell state particles nor to combine them with single photons,and so on.The implementation of this protocol depends on the development of quantum technology in the future.
Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) can guarantee security using the characteristics of quantum mechanics even when a message is directly transmitted through a quantum channel without using a secret key. However, the transmission rate of the QSDC is limited by the dead time of a single photon detector (SPD) as well as channel loss over the distance. To overcome this limited transmission rate, we propose a high-dimensional single photon-based QSDC protocol that applies two optical degrees of freedom: time and phase state. First, an N-dimensional time and phase state generation method that considers the dead time is proposed to minimize the measurement loss of a transmitted message. Second, among the two types of quantum states, the phase state with relatively low measurement efficiency is used only for eavesdropping detection, and the time state is used for sending messages with differential delay time bin-based encoding techniques. Lastly, we propose an efficient method for measuring N-dimensional time and phase-based quantum states and recovering classical bit information. This study performs security analysis against various attacks, and verifies the transmission rate improvement effect through simulation. The result indicates that our proposal can guarantee higher security and transmission rates compared to the conventional DL04 QSDC.
Quantum secure direct communication is an important mode of quantum communication in which secret messages are securely communicated directly over a quantum channel. Quantum secure direct communication is also a basic cryptographic primitive for constructing other quantum communication tasks, such as quantum authentication and quantum dialog. Here, we report the first experimental demonstration of quantum secure direct communication based on the DL04 protocol and equipped with single-photon frequency coding that explicitly demonstrated block transmission. In our experiment, we provided 16 different frequency channels, equivalent to a nibble of four-bit binary numbers for direct information transmission. The experiment firmly demonstrated the feasibility of quantum secure direct communication in the presence of noise and loss.
We propose a free-space quantum secure direct communication protocol by using hyper-encoded single photons. The communication parties can securely exchange private information in a deterministic way. In this protocol, single photons are encoded simultaneously by both the polarization and spatial-mode degrees of freedom that constitute a decoherence-free space. The detrimental effect introduced by either reference-frame misalignment or practical channel rotational noise is passively suppressed. Finally, the security of our protocol against classical individual attacks is proved by quantum mutual information.