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Physical Review A

Practical measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution without vacuum sources

Xiao-Long Hu, Yi-Heng Zhou, Zong‐Wen Yu, Xiang‐Bin Wang

Published Mar 28, 2017• 22 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Most of existing protocols for the decoy-state measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution use vacuum sources or extremely weak sources, but the laboratory cannot give real vacuum sources or precise extremely weak sources. We present a four-intensity protocol without using any of them. Our protocol gives a secure key rate close to those in the protocols with vacuum sources.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.95.032331

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Most of existing protocols for the decoy-state measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution use vacuum sources or extremely weak sources, but the laboratory cannot give real vacuum sources or precise extremely weak sources. We present a four-intensity protocol without using any of them. Our protocol gives a secure key rate close to those in the protocols with vacuum sources.
We present an efficient decoy-state protocol measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution without vacuum source, with the heralded single-photon source (HSPS) and global optimization. This protocol is able to give a high key rate and avoid the security problem caused by the vacuum source or extremely weak source. In the protocol, the heralded outcome pulse pairs in XXX basis are used as decoy pairs and all outcome pairs in ZZZ basis are used as signal pairs. Each side uses three different intensities for the outcome pulses, two in XXX basis and one in ZZZ basis. In order to efficiently optimize the key rate globally, we present an efficient method to estimate what values we will observe by using the HSPS. This efficient method greatly reduces the computation complexity from the fourfold summation to a single-fold summation in the numerical simulation and makes it operable to seek the optimization points globally.
To date, only active-decoy-state methods have been adopted in current measurement-device-independent (MDI) quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols, causing security loopholes when modulating multiple light intensities with practical devices. To solve this problem, the passive-decoy-state method will be a good choice. Until today practical passive-decoy-state MDI QKD is still missing. In this paper, based on a recently discussed structure of heralded single-photon sources, we propose a passive-decoy-state MDI QKD protocol. In present work, one does not need to modulate light sources into different intensities, but utilizes the built-in local detection events to passively generate different decoy states. Furthermore, through carrying out an appropriate mathematical method, we are able to give very precise estimations for single-photon-pair contributions. As a result, our protocol can exhibit distinct advantages compared with state-of-the-art MDI QKD schemes even when the finite-key-size effect is taken into account. Therefore, our protocol seems a promising candidate to enhance both the security and performance of MDI QKD in practical implementation.
Quantum key distribution involving decoy-states is a significant application of quantum information. By using three-intensity decoy-states of single-photon-added coherent sources, we propose a practically realizable scheme on quantum key distribution which approaches very closely the ideal asymptotic case of an infinite number of decoy-states. We make a comparative study between this scheme and two other existing ones, i.e., two-intensity decoy-states with single-photon-added coherent sources, and three-intensity decoy-states with weak coherent sources. Through numerical analysis, we demonstrate the advantages of our scheme in secure transmission distance and the final key generation rate.
Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) is immune to all the detection attacks; thus when it is combined with the decoy-state method, the final key is unconditionally secure, even if a practical weak coherent source is used by Alice and Bob. However, until now, the analysis of decoy-state MDI-QKD with a weak coherent source is incomplete. In this paper, we derive, with only vacuum+weak decoy state, some tight formulas to estimate the lower bound of yield and the upper bound of error rate for the fraction of signals in which both Alice and Bob send a single-photon pulse to the untrusted third party Charlie. The numerical simulations show that our method with only vacuum+weak decoy state can asymptotically approach the theoretical limit of the infinite number of decoy states. Furthermore, the statistical fluctuation due to the finite length of date is also considered based on the standard statistical analysis.
The protocol of reference-frame-independent measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution has many advantages compared with other existing quantum key distribution protocols, and thus has many interesting applications in the field of quantum information. In this paper, we propose a scheme on the reference-frame-independent measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution by implementing heralded single-photon sources, where we only need to modulate pump light into two intensities (vacuum and nonvacuum). Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that our scheme can exhibit much longer transmission distance than the standard three-intensity decoy-state measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution under a reference-frame-independent scenario.