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Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference

Complete physical simulation of the entangling-probe attack on the BB84 protocol

Taehyun Kim, Ingo Stork genannt Wersborg, Franco N. C. Wong, Jeffrey H. Shapiro

Published May 1, 2007• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

We have implemented the most powerful individual-photon attack against the Bennett-Brassard 1984 quantum key distribution protocol. Our measurement results are in good agreement with theoretical predictions for the eavesdropper's Rényi information.
DOI
10.1109/qels.2007.4431646

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We have used deterministic single-photon two-qubit quantum logic to implement the most powerful individual-photon attack against the Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) quantum key distribution protocol. Our measurement results, including physical source and gate errors, are in good agreement with theoretical predictions for the R\'enyi information obtained by Eve as a function of the errors she imparts to Alice and Bob's sifted key bits. The current experiment is a physical simulation of a true attack, because Eve has access to Bob's physical receiver module. Nevertheless, the physical simulation allows investigation of the fundamental security limit of the BB84 protocol against eavesdropping in the presence of realistic physical errors, and it affords the opportunity to study the effectiveness of error correction and privacy amplification when the BB84 protocol is attacked.
It is argued that the BB84 (Bennett–Brassard 1984) protocol of quantum key distribution has a vulnerability similar to the well-known vulnerability of the B92 (Bennett 1992) protocol in the presence of losses. The quantum circuit and design are first reviewed for an optimized entangling probe attacking the BB84 protocol of quantum key distribution and yielding maximum information to the probe. Probe photon polarization states become optimally entangled with the signal states on their way between the legitimate transmitter and receiver. Although standard von Neumann projective measurements of the probe yield maximum information on the pre-privacy amplified key, if instead the probe measurements are performed with a certain positive operator valued measure, then the measurement results are unambiguous, at least some of the time, resulting in complete information gain by the probe for sufficient loss in the key distribution channel.
The theoretical Quantum Key-Distribution scheme of Bennett and Brassard (BB84) has been proven secure against very strong attacks including the collective attacks and the joint attacks. Though the latter are the most general attacks, collective attacks are much easier to analyze, yet, they are conjectured to be as informative to the eavesdropper. Thus, collective attacks are likely to be useful in the analysis of many theoretical and practical schemes that are still lacking a proof of security, including practical BB84 schemes. We show how powerful tools developed in previous works for proving security against the joint attack, are simplified when applied to the security of BB84 against collective attacks whilst providing the same bounds on leaked information and the same error threshold.