We develop an information-theoretic analysis of Quantum-Memory-Free (QMF) Quantum Secure Direct Communication (QSDC) under collective attacks as an alternative to the use of a conventional Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocol in conjunction with one-time pads. Our main contributions are: 1) a QMF-QSDC protocol that only relies on universal hashing of coded sequences without wiretap coding; 2) a set of privacy amplification theorems for extracting secrecy from coded classical sequences against quantum side-information. These tools open the way to the design of effective QMF-QSDC protocols.
We develop an information-theoretic analysis of Quantum-Memory-Free (QMF) Quantum Secure Direct Communication (QSDC) under collective attacks as an alternative to the use of a conventional Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocol in conjunction with one-time pads. Our main contributions are: 1) a QMF-QSDC protocol that only relies on universal hashing of coded sequences without wiretap coding; 2) a set of privacy amplification theorems for extracting secrecy from coded classical sequences against quantum side-information. These tools open the way to the design of effective QMF-QSDC protocols.
Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is capable of direct confidential communications over a quantum channel, which is achieved by dispensing with the key agreement channel of the well-known quantum key distribution (QKD). However, to make QSDC a practical reality, we have to mitigate its reliance on quantum memory, its immediate communication interruption caused by eavesdropping and its low transmission reliability due to the heavy qubit losses. Hence a new QSDC protocol is proposed based on a sophisticated coded single-photon DL04 QSDC protocol to tackle the open challenges. In particular, quantum memory is dispensed with and a high-accuracy secrecy capacity estimate is derived for this protocol by conceiving dynamic joint encryption and error-control (JEEC) coding. We demonstrate that this quantum-memory-free DL04 QSDC (QMF-DL04 QSDC) protocol inches closer to the quantum channel's capacity and significantly improves the original DL04 QSDC's robustness. Moreover, a rate-compatible low-rate JEEC coding scheme is designed for the proposed framework, and the JEEC code advocated is shown to approach the secrecy capacity, despite tolerating an extremely high loss of qubits in the time-varying wiretap channel. Our simulations and experimental results demonstrate that the QMF-DL04 QSDC scheme significantly increases both the secure information rate and the communication distance of the original DL04 protocol.
Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is one of the most important branches of quantum communication. In contrast to the quantum key distribution (QKD) which distributes a secure key between distant parties, QSDC directly transmits secret message instead of sharing key in advance. To establish a secure QSDC protocol, on the one hand, the security of the quantum channel should be confirmed before the exchange of the secret message. On the other hand, the quantum state should be transmitted in a quantum data block since the security of QSDC is based on the error rate analysis in the theories on statistics. Compared with the deterministic quantum key distribution (DQKD) which can also be used to transmit deterministic information, QSDC schemes do not need extra classical bits to read the secret message except for public discussion. In this article, we introduce the basic principles of QSDC and review the development in this field by introducing typical QSDC protocols chronologically. The first QSDC protocol was proposed by Long and Liu, which can be used to establish a common key between distant parties. In their scheme, the method for transmitting quantum states in a block by block way and in multiple steps was proposed and the information leakage before eavesdropping detection was solved. Subsequently, Deng et al. presented two pioneering QSDC schemes, an entangled-state-based two-step QSDC scheme and a single-photon-state-based quantum one-time pad scheme, in which the basic principle and criteria for QSDC were pointed out. From then on, many interesting QSDC schemes have been proposed, including the high-dimension QSDC scheme based on quantum superdense coding, multi-step QSDC scheme based on Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, QSDC scheme based on quantum encryption with practical non-maximally entangled quantum channel, and so on. We also introduce the anti-noise QSDC schemes which were designed for coping with the collective-dephasing noise and the collective-rotation noise, respectively. In 2011, Wang et al. presented the first QSDC which exploited the hyperentangled state as the information carrier and several QSDC schemes based on the spatial degree of freedom (DOF) of photon, single-photon multi-DOF state and hyperentanglement were proposed subsequently. In addition to the point-to-point QSDC schemes, we also review the QSDC networks. Finally, a perspective of QSDC research is given in the last section.
The extensive studies on the quantum communication, which provides a novel means of secure communication, have been carried out in last decades. Among the various types of quantum communication, quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) can securely transmit message directly through a quantum channel. This paper reports a practical scheme of QSDC without quantum memory, taking advantage of the wiretap channel theory and classical coding theory. The proposed approach solves one of the biggest obstacle of practical applications of QSDC, the quantum memory, which is indispensable in original QSDC protocols. The design and detailed scheme for implementation of the proposed protocol are given.
Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) can transmit secret messages directly from one user to another without first establishing a shared secret key, which is different from quantum key distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel quantum secure direct communication protocol based on signal photons and Bell states. Before the execution of the proposed protocol, two participants Alice and Bob exchange their corresponding identity IDA and IDB through quantum key distribution and keep them secret, respectively. Then the message sender, Alice, encodes each secret message bit into two single photons (| 01〉or|10〉) or a Bell state , and composes an ordered secret message sequence. To insure the security of communication, Alice also prepares the decoy photons and inserts them into secret message sequence on the basis of the values of IDA and IDB. By the secret identity IDA and IDB, both sides of the communication can check eavesdropping and identify each other. The proposed protocol not only completes secure direct communication, but also realizes the mutual authentication. The security analysis of the proposed protocol is presented in the paper. The analysis results show that this protocol is secure against some common attacks, and no secret message leaks even if the messages are broken. Compared with the two-way QSDC protocols, the presented protocol is a one-way quantum communication protocol which has the immunity to Trojan horse attack. Furthermore, our proposed protocol can be realized without quantum memory.
Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is an important branch of quantum communication that is capable of directly transmitting secret messages over a quantum channel. It may be viewed as a concrete realization of Wyner's wiretap channel theory, which ensures the reliable and secure communication of information in the presence of noise and eavesdropping. Hence it is a fully-fledged quantum-communications protocol, which does not require a separate secret key negotiation phase. By contrast, its quantum key distribution (QKD) counterpart represents a secret key-negotiation protocol, which has to be followed up by a separate classical communication session. The essential difference between these two modes of quantum communication lies in the employment of a block-based data transmission technique, proposed by Long and Liu in 2000. However, the original block-based data transmission requires quantum memory, which is not widely available at the time of writing. Recently, this difficulty has been overcome by using classical coding theory, which has been successfully applied to the single-qubit DL04 QSDC. Here we will present a single-photon-memory QSDC protocol based on entangled pairs of photons. We commence by comparing QSDC to QKD, followed by an example of the single-photon QSDC and single-photon QKD protocol. Then we continue by modifying the so-called two-step QSDC protocol designed for deterministic QKD by reducing the number of qubits in a block into a single one, in which Alice prepares Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) photon pairs and partitions them into two parts: the so-called pioneer qubit and the follow-up qubit. The pioneer photon is transferred first to Bob, while the follow-up photon is used either for performing encoding or for eavesdropping detection. Bob extracts the candidate key by combining the two particles of the EPR pair to perform Bell-basis measurement. Then the protocol is transformed into a single-photon-memory QSDC using coding theory. Our theoretical analysis shows that the resultant protocol is robust to individual attacks. Additionally, a high communication efficiency is achieved.
Abstract In the last decades, Quantum Cryptography has become one of the most important branches of Quantum Communications with a particular projection over the future Quantum Internet. It is precisely in Quantum Cryptography where two techniques stand out above all others: Quantum key Distribution (QKD), and Quantum Secure Direct Communication (QSDC). The first one has four loopholes relating to the exposure of the key at all points in the communication system, while the second has clear practical implementation problems in all its variants currently in use. Here, we present an alternative to QKD and QSDC techniques called quantum key secure communication (QKSC) protocol with a successful implementation on two free access quantum platforms.