Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) provides an innovative approach for secure communication by utilizing the principles of quantum mechanics. Among various QKD protocols, the BB84 protocol remains the most widely studied and implemented due to its simplicity and theoretical security guarantees. However, practical implementations of BB84 are vulnerable to several eavesdropping attacks and channel imperfections. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the detection and analysis of eavesdropping attacks in the BB84 protocol. The work focuses on common attacks such as intercept-resend attack, photon-number splitting attack, Trojan horse attack, and phase-covariant cloning attack. The effect of these attacks on Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBER) is analyzed in detail. Simulation-based observations are discussed to demonstrate how QBER increases under malicious interference. The study further explores statistical methods for detecting eavesdropping and examines practical countermeasures including decoy states, privacy amplification, and error correction techniques. The paper concludes that BB84 remains robust against eavesdropping when proper detection and mitigation mechanisms are employed.
The quantum key distribution protocol with classical Bob, well known as semiquantum key distribution, has been proposed a few years back (Boyer et al., PRL 2007, PRA 2009). In this protocol Alice has the same capability as in the traditional BB84 protocol, but Bob is limited by the constraint that he can measure or prepare qubits only in
{∣0>,∣1>} basis and reflect any other qubit (or in other words, let it go undisturbed). In this scheme the qubits travel from Alice to Bob and then again from Bob to Alice. We study an eavesdropping strategy on this scheme that listens to the channel in both the directions. With the same level of disturbance induced in the channel, Eve can be extract more information using our two-way strategy than what can be obtained by the direct application of one-way eavesdropping in case of BB84 protocol. Towards resisting this eavesdropping strategy, we modify the semiquantum scheme by incorporating a Hadamard gate at Bob's end.