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The intercept/resend attack and the collective attack on the six-state protocol of the quantum key distribution

Hiroo Azuma, Masashi Ban

Published Nov 30, 2019• 2 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss security of the six-state quantum key distribution protocol against intercept/resend attacks and collective attacks. For the intercept/resend attacks, we evaluate a probability that the legitimate users, Alice and Bob, do not notice interference caused by the eavesdropper Eve and a probability that Eve obtains a secret bit sent by Alice. For the collective attacks, we estimate not only the above two probabilities but also Eve's Shannon information. In the assessment of the security against the collective attacks, imposing looser constraints upon Eve's strategies than Bechmann-Pasquinucci and Gisin, we reach substantially the same result as their study. In other words, although we let Eve's strategies satisfy lower symmetry than Bechmann-Pasquinucci and Gisin, both their work and ours attain the same conclusion, i.e. the identical, unique, and optimum strategy. This implies that we obtain Eve's best tactic by applying simpler conditions to it than Bechmann-Pasquinucci and Gisin, so that this result is novel. Finally, we consider a relation between the six-state protocol and the E91 scheme. We show that the intercept/resend attacks can always be described by hidden variable models. In contrast, we demonstrate that we cannot regard the collective attacks as the hidden variable theories if the disturbance is smaller than $1/3$.

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arXiv:1912.00196•Nov 30, 2019•0 citations
In this paper, we discuss security of the six-state quantum key distribution protocol against intercept/resend attacks and collective attacks. For the intercept/resend attacks, we evaluate a probability that the legitimate users, Alice and Bob, do not notice interference caused by the eavesdropper Eve and a probability that Eve obtains a secret bit sent by Alice. For the collective attacks, we estimate not only the above two probabilities but also Eve's Shannon information. In the assessment of the security against the collective attacks, imposing looser constraints upon Eve's strategies than Bechmann-Pasquinucci and Gisin, we reach substantially the same result as their study. In other words, although we let Eve's strategies satisfy lower symmetry than Bechmann-Pasquinucci and Gisin, both their work and ours attain the same conclusion, i.e. the identical, unique, and optimum strategy. This implies that we obtain Eve's best tactic by applying simpler conditions to it than Bechmann-Pasquinucci and Gisin, so that this result is novel. Finally, we consider a relation between the six-state protocol and the E91 scheme. We show that the intercept/resend attacks can always be described by hidden variable models. In contrast, we demonstrate that we cannot regard the collective attacks as the hidden variable theories if the disturbance is smaller than 1/31/31/3.
We investigate the effect of collective-rotation noise on the security of the six-state quantum key distribution. We study the case where the eavesdropper, Eve, performs an intercept-resend attack on the quantum communication between Alice, the sender, and Bob, the receiver. We first derive the collective-rotation noise model for the six-state protocol and then parameterize the mutual information between Alice and Eve. We then derive quantum bit error rate for three intercept-resend attack scenarios. We observe that the six-state protocol is robust against intercept-resend attacks on collective rotation noise channels when the rotation angle is kept within certain bounds.
The security analysis of the Ekert 1991 (E91), Bennett 1992 (B92), six-state protocol, Scarani–Acín–Ribordy–Gisin 2004 (SARG04) quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols, and their variants have been studied in the presence of collective-rotation noise channels. However, besides the Bennett–Brassard 1984 (BB84) being the first proposed, extensively studied, and essential protocol, its security proof under collective-rotation noise is still missing. Thus, we aim to close this gap in the literature. Consequently, we investigate how collective-rotation noise channels affect the security of the BB84 protocol. Mainly, we study scenarios where the eavesdropper, Eve, conducts an intercept-resend attack on the transmitted photons sent via a quantum communication channel shared by Alice and Bob. Notably, we distinguish the impact of collective-rotation noise and that of the eavesdropper. To achieve this, we provide rigorous, yet straightforward numerical calculations. First, we derive a model for the collective-rotation noise for the BB84 protocol and parametrize the mutual information shared between Alice and Eve. This is followed by deriving the quantum bit error rate (QBER) for two intercept-resend attack scenarios. In particular, we demonstrate that, for small rotation angles, one can extract a secure secret key under a collective-rotation noise channel when there is no eavesdropping. We observe that noise induced by rotation of 0.35 radians of the prepared quantum state results in a QBER of 11%, which corresponds to the lower bound on the tolerable error rate for the BB84 QKD protocol against general attacks. Moreover, a rotational angle of 0.53 radians yields a 25% QBER, which corresponds to the error rate bound due to the intercept-resend attack. Finally, we conclude that the BB84 protocol is robust against intercept-resend attacks on collective-rotation noise channels when the rotation angle is varied arbitrarily within particular bounds.
We investigate the effect of collective-rotation noise on the security of the six-state quantum key distribution. We study the case where the eavesdropper, Eve, performs an intercept-resend attack on the quantum communication between Alice, the sender, and Bob, the receiver. We first derive the collective-rotation noise model for the six-state protocol and then parameterize the mutual information between Alice and Eve. We then derive quantum bit error rate for three interceptresend attack scenarios. We observe that the six-state protocol is robust against intercept-resend attacks on collective rotation noise channels when the rotation angle is kept within certain bounds.
So far, the knowledge of Eve has been modeled by a classical random variable. The aim of this chapter is first to discuss how the previous results apply to QKD, where Eve's action may not necessarily be classically described by the random variable Z . Then, we explain the equivalence between BB84 and so-called entanglement purification protocols as a tool to encompass general eavesdropping strategies. Finally, we apply this equivalence to the case of the coherent-state protocol GG02. Eavesdropping strategies and secret-key distillation In Chapters 10 and 11, I analyzed the security of the protocols with regard to individual eavesdropping strategies only. In this particular case, the result of Alice's, Bob's and Eve's measurements can be described classically and the results of Section 6.4 apply. Let us review other kinds of eavesdropping strategies and discuss how the concepts of Chapter 6 can be applied. Note that the individual eavesdropping strategy, the simplest class of strategies, is still technologically very challenging to achieve today in an optimal way. Nevertheless, we do not want the security of quantum cryptography to rely only on technological barriers. By considering more general eavesdropping strategies, we make sure quantum cryptography lies on strong grounds. Following Gisin et al. [64], we divide the possible eavesdropping strategies into three categories: individual attacks, collective attacks and joint attacks .
We consider a strategic problem of the Evesdropping to quantum key distribution. Evesdropper hopes to obtain the maxium information given the disturbance to the qubits is often For this strategy, the optimized individual attack have been extensively constructed under various conditions. However, it seems a difficult task in the case of coherent attack, i.e., Eve may treat a number of intercepted qubits collectively, including the collective unitary transformations and the measurements. It was conjectured by Cirac and Gisin that no coherent attack can be more powerful for this strategy for BB84 protocol. In this paper we give a general conclusion on the role of coherent attacks for the strategy of maxmizing the information given the disturbance. Suppose in a quantum key distribution(QKD) protocol, all the transmitted bits from Alice are independent and only the individual disturbances to each qubits are examined by Alice and Bob. For this type of protocols(so far almost all QKD protocols belong to this type), in principle no coherent attack is more powerful than the product of optimized individual attack to each individual qubits. All coherent attacks to the above QKD protocols can be disregarded for the strategy above.
In this paper, we show that there are instances where eavesdropping causes noise reduction for a quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol. To witness these phenomena, we investigate a fault-tolerant six-state QKD protocol over a collective unitary noise channel. In this protocol, legitimate users send and receive two-qubit states that belong to the noiseless subspace being robust against collective unitary errors. We examine eavesdropper's intercept/resend and entangling probe attacks on this protocol. In general, the collective unitary noises lessen the probability that legitimate users share a random bit with the QKD protocol. However, we show that eavesdropping enlarges that probability in some specific scenarios although the effects of the collective unitary noise channel are strong enough. These phenomena make the legitimate users difficult to distinguish between noises and eavesdropper's malicious acts by monitoring the probability that they share the same random key.