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Journal of Physics B Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics

Security of two-way continuous-variable quantum key distribution with source noise

Tianyi Wang, Song Yu, Yichen Zhang, Wanyi Gu, Hong Mei Guo

Published Oct 15, 2014• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate the security of reverse reconciliation two-way continuous-variable quantum key distribution with source noise at both legitimate sides. Because the source noise originates from imperfect devices, we ascribe it to the legitimate sides rather than the eavesdropper. The trusted model consists of a thermal noise injected into a beam splitter. The expressions of secret key rate are derived against collective entangling cloner attacks for homodyne and heterodyne detections. Simulation results show that by applying the trusted model, the security bound of the reverse reconciliation two-way protocols can be tightened, while the advantage over one-way protocols still maintains.

DOI
10.1088/0953-4075/47/21/215504

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We investigate the security of reverse reconciliation two-way continuous-variable quantum key distribution with source noise at both legitimate sides. Because the source noise originates from imperfect devices, we ascribe it to the legitimate sides rather than the eavesdropper. The trusted model consists of a thermal noise injected into a beam splitter. The expressions of secret key rate are derived against collective entangling cloner attacks for homodyne and heterodyne detections. Simulation results show that by applying the trusted model, the security bound of the reverse reconciliation two-way protocols can be tightened, while the advantage over one-way protocols still maintains.
We consider the security of continuous-variable quantum key distribution using thermal (or noisy) Gaussian resource states. Specifically, we analyze this against collective Gaussian attacks using direct and reverse reconciliation where both protocols use either homodyne or heterodyne detection. We show that in the case of direct reconciliation with heterodyne detection, an improved robustness to channel noise is achieved when large amounts of preparation noise is added, as compared to the case when no preparation noise is added. We also consider the theoretical limit of infinite preparation noise and show a secure key can still be achieved in this limit provided the channel noise is less than the preparation noise. Finally, we consider the security of quantum key distribution at various electromagnetic wavelengths and derive an upper bound related to an entanglement-breaking eavesdropping attack and discuss the feasibility of microwave quantum key distribution.
We propose an improved two-way continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV QKD) protocol by adding proper random noise on the receiver's homodyne detection, the security of which is analysed against general collective attacks. The simulation result under the collective entangling cloner attack indicates that despite the correlation between two-way channels decreasing the secret key rate relative to the uncorrelated channels slightly, the performance of the two-way protocol is still far beyond that of the one-way protocols. Importantly, the added noise in detection is beneficial for the secret key rate and the tolerable excess noise of this two-way protocol. With the reasonable reconciliation efficiency of 90%, the two-way CV QKD with added noise allows the distribution of secret keys over 60 km fibre distance.
Abstract Two-way continuous-variable quantum key distribution protocol, where the parties make a double use of the quantum channel, shows the general superadditivity in the security thresholds, which are proven to be higher than that of the classical one-way protocol. However, all existing security proofs for two-way protocols assume perfect source devices or a trusted source noise, which is hard to ensure in a practical system. In this paper, the effects of multiple source fluctuations on the security of the two-way protocol are proposed, where Eve may have access to the intensity fluctuation information with an arbitrary random distribution. This work is comprehensive of several practical scenarios, encompassing both ON and OFF configurations, with and without the assumption that trusted users can access the fluctuation information. The analysis shows that when the users have no fluctuation information, the intensity fluctuation effect in the ON configuration should be modeled as an additional thermal noise rather than being described by a beam splitter model as in the general one-way protocol. In addition, this untrusted noise is only related to the intensity fluctuation variance but has no relation to its distribution. Finally, the tagging idea is applied to the two-way protocol to obtain a conservative secure key.
Abstract We analyze the security of the two-way continuous-variable quantum key distribution protocol in reverse reconciliation against general two-mode attacks, which represent all accessible attacks at fixed channel parameters. Rather than against one specific attack model, the expression of secret key rates of the two-way protocol are derived against all accessible attack models. It is found that there is an optimal two-mode attack to minimize the performance of the protocol in terms of both secret key rates and maximal transmission distances. We identify the optimal two-mode attack, give the specific attack model of the optimal two-mode attack and show the performance of the two-way protocol against the optimal two-mode attack. Even under the optimal two-mode attack, the performances of two-way protocol are still better than the corresponding one-way protocol, which shows the advantage of making double use of the quantum channel and the potential of long-distance secure communication using a two-way protocol.
We address the role of the phase-insensitive trusted preparation and detection noise in the security of a continuous-variable quantum key distribution, considering the Gaussian protocols on the basis of coherent and squeezed states and studying them in the conditions of Gaussian lossy and noisy channels. The influence of such a noise on the security of Gaussian quantum cryptography can be crucial, even despite the fact that a noise is trusted, due to a strongly nonlinear behavior of the quantum entropies involved in the security analysis. We recapitulate the known effect of the preparation noise in both direct and reverse-reconciliation protocols, as well as the detection noise in the reverse-reconciliation scenario. As a new result, we show the negative role of the trusted detection noise in the direct-reconciliation scheme. We also describe the role of the trusted preparation or detection noise added at the reference side of the protocols in improving the robustness of the protocols to the channel noise, confirming the positive effect for the coherent-state reverse-reconciliation protocol. Finally, we address the combined effect of trusted noise added both in the source and the detector.