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arXiv:2101.01483

Quantum Conference Key Agreement with Photon Loss

Phattharaporn Singkanipa, Pieter Kok

Published Jan 5, 2021• 1 citation
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Abstract

Conference key agreement (CKA) is an information processing task where more than two parties want to share a common secret key. Here, we present a loss-resilient protocol for CKA, based on redundant encoding and error correction. Our protocol provides a speed-up in transmission rate over the existing lossy CKA protocol. However, encoding and error correction come with extra cost. We show that, using photon sources with creation probability p > 0.3, our protocol's secret key rate can overcome the existing protocol's. Hence, high probability entangled photon sources are required for realistic implementation of our loss-resilient protocol.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2101.01483

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Conference key agreement (CKA) is an information processing task where more than two parties want to share a common secret key. Here, we present a loss-resilient protocol for CKA, based on redundant encoding and error correction. Our protocol provides a speed-up in transmission rate over the existing lossy CKA protocol. However, encoding and error correction come with extra cost. We show that, using photon sources with creation probability p > 0.3, our protocol's secret key rate can overcome the existing protocol's. Hence, high probability entangled photon sources are required for realistic implementation of our loss-resilient protocol.
Conference key agreement (CKA) is a cryptographic effort of multiple parties to establish a shared secret key.In future quantum networks, generating secret keys in an anonymous way is of tremendous importance for parties that want to keep their shared key secret and at the same time protect their own identity.We provide a definition of anonymity for general protocols and present a CKA protocol that is provably anonymous under realistic adversarial scenarios.We base our protocol on shared Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, which have been proposed as more efficient resources for CKA protocols, compared to bipartite entangled resources.The existence of secure and anonymous protocols based on multipartite entangled states provides a new insight on their potential as resources and paves the way for further applications.
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Quantum cryptography is a major ingredient of the future quantum internet that promises various secure communication tasks. Quantum conference key agreement (CKA) is an important cryptographic primitive of quantum cryptography, which provides the conference key among multiple users simultaneously. However, quantum CKA is currently far from practical application due to the low conference key rate. Here, we propose a quantum CKA protocol of three users with information-theoretic security. Our protocol only requires phase-randomized weak coherent sources and threshold single-photon detectors, and is anticipated to be experimentally demonstrated over 600 km under current technology. Our scheme can be widely implemented in the approaching large-scale quantum network.
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Abstract Quantum conference key agreement (CKA) enables key sharing among multiple trusted users with information-theoretic security. Currently, the key rates of most quantum CKA protocols suffer from the limit of the total efficiency among quantum channels. Inspired by the coherent one-way and twin-field quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols, we propose a quantum CKA protocol of three users. Exploiting coherent states with intensity 0 and μ to encode logic bits, our protocol can break the limit. Additionally, the requirements of phase randomization and multiple intensity modulation are removed in our protocol, making its experimental demonstration simple.