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Practical High-Dimensional Quantum Key Distribution with Decoy States

Darius Bunandar, Zheshen Zhang, Jeffrey H. Shapiro, Dirk Englund

Published Jan 1, 2015• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We propose a high-dimensional quantum key distribution protocol secure against photon-number splitting attack by employing only one or two decoy states. Decoy states dramatically increase the protocol's secure distance.
DOI
10.1364/cleo_qels.2015.ff1a.2

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High-dimensional quantum key distribution (HD-QKD) allows two parties to generate multiple secure bits of information per detected photon. In this work, we show that decoy-state protocols can be practically implemented for HD-QKD using only one or two decoy states. HD-QKD with two decoy states, under realistic experimental constraints, can generate multiple secure bits per coincidence at distances over 200 km and at rates similar to those achieved by a protocol with infinite decoy states. Furthermore, HD-QKD with only one decoy state is practical at short distances, where it is almost as secure as a protocol with two decoy states. HD-QKD with only one or two decoy states can therefore be implemented to optimize the rate of secure quantum communications.
The decoy-state high-dimensional quantum key distribution provides a practical secure way to share more private information with high photon-information efficiency. In this paper, based on detector-decoy method, we propose a detector-decoy high-dimensional quantum key distribution protocol. Employing threshold detectors and a variable attenuator, we can promise the security under Gsussian collective attacks with much simpler operations in practical implementation. By numerical evaluation, we show that without varying the source intensity, our protocol performs much better than one-decoy-state protocol and as well as the two-decoy-state protocol in the infinite-size regime. In the finite-size regime, our protocol can achieve better results. Specially, when the detector efficiency is lower, the advantage of the detector-decoy method becomes more prominent.
A quantum key distribution with decoherence-free subspaces has been proposed to overcome collective noise to the polarization modes of photons flying in quantum channels. Prototypes of this scheme have also been achieved with a parametric down-conversion source. However, the photon-number-splitting attack we propose will make practical implementations of this scheme insecure since the parametric down-conversion source may occasionally emit multiphoton pairs. We propose a decoy-state method to make these implementations immune to this attack. With this decoy-state method, both the security distance and key bit rate will be increased.
Subcarrier wave quantum key distribution systems demonstrate promising capabilities for secure quantum networking. However for this class of devices no implementation of secure decoy states protocol was developed. It leaves them potentially vulnerable to photon-number splitting attacks on quantum channel and limiting the key distribution distance. We propose a practical solution to this problem by calculating the required parameters of light source and modulation indices for signal and decoy states in a subcarrier wave system and describing the corresponding experimental scheme.
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) enables secure key exchange, based on fundamental laws of quantum mechanics [1] . There exist various protocols which are mathematically proven to be secure, however, for an actual implementation vulnerabilities, due to non-ideal components, must be considered. For example, the usage of faint lasers instead of single-photon sources undermines the security, as even for mean photon numbers per pulse µ ≪ 1 there is a non-vanishing probability of emitting multiple photons. The decoy protocol [2] , [3] offers a countermeasure. When randomly switching between two or more different pulse intensity levels, by exploiting their non-orthogonality, the so-called photon number splitting (PNS) attack can be revealed.