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Journal of Physics Communications

Practical reference-frame-independent quantum key distribution systems against the worst relative rotation of reference frames

Chun-Mei Zhang, Jian-Rong Zhu, Qin Wang

Published May 17, 2018• 14 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Reference-frame-independent quantum key distribution (RFI-QKD) can generate secret keys with the slow drift of reference frames. However, the performance of practical RFI-QKD systems deteriorates with the increasing drift of reference frames. In this paper, we mathematically demonstrate the worst relative rotation of reference frames for practical RFI-QKD systems, and investigate the corresponding performance with optimized system parameters. Simulation results show that practical RFI-QKD systems can achieve quite good performance against the worst relative rotation of reference frames, which exhibit the feasibility of practical QKD systems with free drifting reference frames. Furthermore, we propose a universal estimation method of the secret key rate in practical RFI-QKD systems, which conforms to the nature of RFI-QKD more well than the usual estimation method.

DOI
10.1088/2399-6528/aac5d4

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Reference-frame-independent quantum key distribution (RFI-QKD) can generate secret keys with the slow drift of reference frames. However, the performance of practical RFI-QKD systems deteriorates with the increasing drift of reference frames. In this paper, we mathematically demonstrate the worst relative rotation of reference frames for practical RFI-QKD systems, and investigate the corresponding performance with optimized system parameters. Simulation results show that practical RFI-QKD systems can achieve quite good performance against the worst relative rotation of reference frames, which exhibit the feasibility of practical QKD systems with free drifting reference frames. Furthermore, we propose a universal estimation method of the secret key rate in practical RFI-QKD systems, which conforms to the nature of RFI-QKD more well than the usual estimation method.
Abstract Reference-frame-independent measurement-device-independent QKD (RFI-MDI-QKD), immune to both the slow unknown drift of reference frames and detector side channel attacks, can generate information-theoretic secure keys. Despite its natural resistance to the slow drift of reference frames, the performance of practical RFI-MDI-QKD systems descends with the increasing drift of reference frames. In this paper, we demonstrate the worst relative rotation of reference frames for practical RFI-MDI-QKD systems, and investigate their performance against the worst-case scenario, both of which are unclear to date. Simulation results show that, practical RFI-MDI-QKD systems can achieve quite good performance even against the worst-case scenario, which clearly demonstrates that it is possible to implement practical MDI-QKD systems with freely drifting reference frames.
Reference-frame-independent quantum key distribution (RFI-QKD) can generate secure keys between two remote peers with an unknown and slowly drifted reference frame. It adopts a statistical quantity C independent of the rotation of the reference frame to estimate the eavesdropper’s knowledge. However, in practical scenarios, the estimation of C should be completed with data collected in a short period of time, since the variation of the reference frame during the run will smear its correlations. In this paper, we propose to improve the performance of RFI-QKD with a new, to the best of our knowledge, statistical quantity R , which is less sensitive to statistical fluctuations and more robust to the variation of the reference frame, and obtain an analytical bound to estimate the eavesdropper’s knowledge. Simulation results show that the performance of RFI-QKD in the non-asymptotic case can be significantly promoted, which is very promising in practical QKD systems. Furthermore, we apply the new statistical quantity R to the RFI measurement-device-independent QKD (RFI-MDI-QKD) protocol and demonstrate that significant improvement can also be obtained in RFI-MDI-QKD.
Reference frame independent quantum key distribution (RFI-QKD) allows two legitimate parties to share the common secret keys with the drift of reference frames. In order to reduce the actual requirements of RFI-QKD protocol on light source and make it more suitable for practical applications, this paper gives a specific description of RFI-QKD protocol with an untrusted source and analyzes the practical security of this protocol based on the two-way “plug and play” structure commonly used in practical systems. In addition, we also investigate the performance of RFI-QKD with an untrusted source considering statistical fluctuations based on Chernoff bound. Using simulations, we compare the secret key rate of RFI-QKD with an untrusted source to RFI-QKD with trusted source. The results show that the performance of RFI-QKD with an untrusted source is similar to that of RFI-QKD with trusted source, and the finite data size clearly effects the performance of our protocol.
During free-space quantum key distribution, the rotation and fluctuation of reference frame degrades the performance of quantum key distribution (QKD). Reference-frame-independent QKD (RFI-QKD) overcomes this issue effectively. To date, much theoretical and experimental research has been conducted on the performance of free-space RFI-QKD. However, these studies are all based on free-space air and satellite ground, and none have investigated the performance of RFI-QKD in an underwater channel. Therefore, this paper constructed a channel model that considered both scattering and optical attenuation to obtain an RFI-QKD secret key rate in an underwater channel. The simulation results confirm that even in a relatively harsh underwater scenario, RFI-QKD maintains good performance.
Reference-frame-independent quantum key distribution (RFI QKD) can generate secret keys without the alignment of reference frames, which is very robust in real-life implementations of QKD systems. However, the performance of decoy-state RFI QKD with both source errors and statistical fluctuations is still missing until now. In this paper, we investigate the performance of decoy-state RFI QKD in practical scenarios with two kinds of light sources, the heralded single photon source (HSPS) and the weak coherent source (WCS), and also give clear comparison results of decoy-state RFI QKD with WCS and HSPS. Simulation results show that the secret key rates of decoy-state RFI QKD with WCS are higher than those with HSPS in short distance range, but the secret key rates of RFI QKD with HSPS outperform those with WCS in long distance range.
Abstract Rapidly and randomly drifted reference frames will shorten the transmission distance and decrease the secure key rate of realistic quantum key distribution (QKD) systems. In this article, we present a free-running reference-frame-independent (RFI) QKD scheme, where measurement events are classified into multiple slices with similar estimated classification parameter. We perform the free-running RFI QKD experiment with a fiber link of 100 km and reference frame misalignment more than 29 periods in 50.7 h. A key rate as high as 742.98 bps is achieved at the total loss of 31.5 dB benefiting from both the new protocol design and the 80 MHz repetition rate system in use. Our system runs 50.7 h freely without any reference frame alignment. In the experiment, the misalignment variation rate tolerance of the experiment is 0.262 rad/s, and could be optimized to 1.309 rad/s. Therefore, our free-running RFI scheme can be efficiently adapted into the satellite-to-ground and drone-based mobile communication scenarios.