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.
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.
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.
Practical quantum key distribution (QKD) systems operate under noise, but security of most protocols have been analyzed under ideal noiseless scenarios. In this work, we investigated security performance of BB84 protocol under effect of collective rotation noise. Using theoretical quantum information frameworks, we analyzed key security parameters including quantum bit error rate (QBER), mutual information and secret key rate (SKR). Security of protocol is studied under various eavesdropping scenarios based on intercept and resend attacks. Our results show that collective rotation noise has a significant impact on the information shared between the two parties. Particularly, we extended prior treatments by suggesting a noise engineering strategy where we identified a non-zero noise range where information accessed by Eve is minimized while corresponding SKR degradation remains relatively small. This analysis provide insights into robustness of BB84 protocol under realistic noisy channels and may contribute towards development of more resilient QKD systems.
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.
This work presents and evaluates two threshold-based detection methods for the Six-State quantum key distribution protocol, considering a realistic scenario involving partial intercept–resend attack and channel noise. The statistical properties of the shared quantum bit error rate (QBER) are analyzed and used to estimate the attacker interception density from observed data. Building on this foundation, the work derives two optimal QBER detection thresholds designed to minimize both false positive and false negative rates, following, respectively, upper theoretical bounds and limit probability density function approach. A developed Qiskit simulation environment enables the evaluation and comparison of the two detection methods on simulated and real-inspired quantum systems with differing noise characteristics. This framework moves beyond theoretical analysis, allowing practical investigation of system noise effects on detection accuracy. Simulation results confirm that both methods are robust and effective, achieving high detection accuracy across all the tested configurations, thereby validating their applicability to real-world quantum communication systems.
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.