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Europhysics Letters (EPL)

Long-distance measurement-device–independent quantum secure direct communication

Zikai Gao, Tao Li, Zhenhua Li

Published Mar 22, 2019• 77 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum secure direct communication enables a direct message exchange over a quantum channel without any key generation in advance. Here we present a feasible protocol for long-distance measurement-device–independent quantum secure direct communication. The secure distance is increased by using ancillary entangled photon-pair sources and relay nodes. Meanwhile, its security is independent from measurement devices, which eliminates the potential loophole for eavesdropping in the detection systems. Moreover, this protocol can be implemented with linear optical devices and single-photon detectors.

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/125/40004

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Europhysics Letters (EPL)•Sep 8, 2020•47 citations
Quantum secure direct communication enables a direct message exchange over a quantum channel without any key generation in advance. Here we present a feasible protocol for long-distance measurement-device–independent quantum secure direct communication. The secure distance is increased by using ancillary entangled photon-pair sources and relay nodes. Meanwhile, its security is independent from measurement devices, which eliminates the potential loophole for eavesdropping in the detection systems. Moreover, this protocol can be implemented with linear optical devices and single-photon detectors.
Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) enables direct message transmission over quantum channels. Loopholes involved in practical apparatus, particularly nonideal measurement devices, provide a potential interface for attacking practical quantum communication. Measurement-device–independent (MDI) QSDC protocols deal with all side-channel attacks on practical measurement devices and directly transmit secret messages over classical channels with both integrity and eavesdropper detection and prevention. We review the recent development of MDI QSDC protocols using both single photons and entangled photon pairs. These two types of MDI QSDC protocols are useful for their respective distinct characters and can be generalized to perform more interesting communication networks.
Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) can directly transmit secrete messages through a quantum channel. Device-independent (DI) QSDC can guarantee the communication security relying only on the observation of the Bell-inequality violation, but not on any detailed description or trust of the inner workings of users' devices. In the paper, we propose a DI-QSDC protocol with practical highly efficient single-photon sources. The communication parties construct the entanglement channel from single photons by adopting the heralded architecture, which makes the message-leakage rate independent of the photon-transmission loss. The secure communication distance and the practical communication efficiency of the current DI-QSDC protocol are about 6 times and 600 times of those in the original DI-QSDC protocol. Combining with the entanglement purification, the parties can construct the nearly perfect entanglement channel and completely eliminate the message leakage. This DI-QSDC protocol may have useful applications in the future quantum communication field.
Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is a quantum communication paradigm that transmits confidential messages directly using quantum states. Measurement-device-independent (MDI) QSDC protocols can eliminate the security loopholes associated with measurement devices. To enhance the practicality and performance of MDI-QSDC protocols, we propose a one-photon-interference MDI QSDC (OPI-QSDC) protocol which transcends the need for quantum memory, ideal single-photon sources, or entangled light sources. The security of our OPI-QSDC protocol has also been analyzed using quantum wiretap channel theory. Furthermore, our protocol could double the distance of usual prepare-and-measure protocols, since quantum states sending from adjacent nodes are connected with single-photon interference, which demonstrates its potential to extend the communication distance for point-to-point QSDC.
Recently, measurement-device-independent quantum secure direct communication schemes were proposed by Niu et al. (Sci.Bull. 63:1345, 2018) and Zhou et al. (Sci. China-Phys. Mech. Astron. 63:230362, 2020). Inspired by their ideas, in this paper, a measurement-device-independent quantum dialogue protocol based on entanglement is designed and proved to be secure. The advantage of this scheme is that it can not only allow two communicators transmit secret message each other, making the application scenarios more extensive, but also eliminate all the security loopholes related to the measurement device and information leakage. In terms of experimental implementation, the scheme mainly involves the preparation of entangled states, the preparation of single photon, quantum storage, Bell measurement and other technologies, all of which are mature at present, therefore, the scheme is feasible by using the current technologies.
Abstract Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) enables the direct transmission of confidential messages without pre-establishing a secret key. Device independence (DI) can further enhance its practical security against untrusted devices. However, existing DI-QSDC protocols rely on a single Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality, which severely limits both the achievable communication distance and the secret message capacity, while the detection loophole remains open in DI-QSDC. To overcome these limitations, we propose a one-sided DI-QSDC protocol based on single-photon sources and heralded entanglement. The protocol combines entanglement distribution, loss-tolerant steering-based security verification, and measurement-DI communication verification and decoding. We employ the Navascués–Pironio–Acín hierarchy based semidefinite programming relaxations to evaluate the secret message capacity. Numerical simulations show that our protocol extends communication distances by factors of 5.6 and 32.2, and improves the practical secure communication efficiency by factors of 1.8 and 1102.5, compared to single-photon-source-based DI-QSDC and SPDC-based DI-QSDC, respectively.
Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) can realize the direct and secure transmission of information instead of sharing secure keys between two parties. Similar to quantum key distribution (QKD), in practical applications, QSDC may suffer from attacks from imperfect detector. Measurement-device–independent QSDC (MDI-QSDC) can remove all attacks at detector's side and close all loopholes in the detection system. However, existing MDI-QSDC protocols have relatively low capacity. In this paper, we propose a high-capacity MDI-QSDC protocol of multiple degrees of freedom of a single photon. Compared with original MDI-QSDC protocols, our protocol has larger channel capacity which can use a single photon to transmit multi-bit of secure information. This protocol may have potential application in future quantum secure communication.