Micro-systems for Scalable QKD Components.

M. Suda

Gupta Ashutosh

To the extent that quantum computing poses a threat to digital security systems, it is largely due to its impact on cryptographic algorithms like RSA and ECC, which are the building blocks of most existing infrastructure important to the global finance industry. The greatest risk is associated with micro transactions, which entail handling large volumes of transactions at unprecedented rates. The transactions are of very low monetary value, so the system should be capable of processing them in real time, with no latency and minimal or no cryptographic overhead. The paper suggests a mixed-method system based on post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and quantum key distribution (QKD) to ensure the security of micro transactions and the efficiency and scalability of the system. The study of the threat posed by classical systems and the Development of a hybrid cryptographic model tailored to the financial micro transaction ecosystem are the main objectives of this study. Simulation and qualitative evaluation of the model are provided to test its performance. The results indicate that the layered quantum-secure model is the most desirable for contemporary cyber threats and potential quantum threats, and hence for a quantum-secure foundation of digital banking ecosystems.

Daniel J. Rogers

Fabian Klingmann, Kriti Dutta, Mira Stephan +6 more

Commercial quantum key distribution (QKD) systems are currently very expensive and usually come as large server rack components. Thus, their application is still very limited and adoption in practical implementations has not happened yet. One reason for the high price and large size is the use of high-end and custom-built hardware. We present for the first time a QKD system that runs an entire BB84 protocol on two microcontrollers and is built from off-the-shelf components. The system includes polarization compensation and postprocessing. It creates secret keys at key rates of up to 1.36 kbit/s. With this system we show that the execution of a QKD protocol is not limited to high-performance hardware. This marks a breakthrough on the way towards an affordable, scalable QKD system that can be easily integrated into existing hardware.

Bernhard Schrenk, Florian Honz, W. Boxleitner +1 more

Natarajan Venkatachalam, Foram P. Shingala, C Selvagangai +4 more

Key Distillation is an essential component of every quantum key distribution (QKD) system because it compensates for the inherent transmission errors of a quantum channel. However, the interoperability and throughput aspects of the post-processing components are often neglected. In this paper, we propose a high-throughput key distillation framework that supports multiple QKD protocols, implemented in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The proposed design adapts a MapReduce programming model to efficiently process large chunks of raw data across the limited computing resources of an FPGA. We present a novel hardware-efficient integrated post-processing architecture that offers dynamic error correction, mutual authentication with a physically unclonable function, and an inbuilt high-speed encryption application that utilizes the key for secure communication. Additionally, we have developed a semi-automated high-level synthesis (HLS) framework that is compatible with any discrete variable QKD system, showing promising speedup. Overall, the experimental results demonstrate a noteworthy enhancement in scalability achieved through the utilization of a single FPGA platform.