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Laser Physics Letters

Feasible high-dimensional measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution

Meng-Ying Yang, Peng Zhao, Lan Zhou, Wei Zhong, Yu‐Bo Sheng

Published Jun 17, 2021• 8 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) can resist all possible attacks from practical measurement devices. High-dimensional (HD) MDI-QKD in multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs) can efficiently increase the key generation rate and has strong noise and error resistance. However, previous HD MDI-QKD protocols in multiple DOFs required complete hyperentangled Bell state analysis (HBSA), which cannot be realized under current experimental conditions and largely limits the practicality of the HD MDI-QKD. In this paper, we propose an HD MDI-QKD protocol in multiple DOFs which adopts a linear-optical HBSA. This adoption of the linear-optical HBSA makes our HD MDI-QKD feasible under current experimental technology. The key generation rate of our MDI-QKD protocol is about eight times of the original MDI-QKD protocol. Our HD MDI-QKD protocol may have potential applications in current and future quantum communication fields.

DOI
10.1088/1612-202x/ac091b

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Abstract Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) can resist all possible attacks from practical measurement devices. High-dimensional (HD) MDI-QKD in multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs) can efficiently increase the key generation rate and has strong noise and error resistance. However, previous HD MDI-QKD protocols in multiple DOFs required complete hyperentangled Bell state analysis (HBSA), which cannot be realized under current experimental conditions and largely limits the practicality of the HD MDI-QKD. In this paper, we propose an HD MDI-QKD protocol in multiple DOFs which adopts a linear-optical HBSA. This adoption of the linear-optical HBSA makes our HD MDI-QKD feasible under current experimental technology. The key generation rate of our MDI-QKD protocol is about eight times of the original MDI-QKD protocol. Our HD MDI-QKD protocol may have potential applications in current and future quantum communication fields.
Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) provides us a powerful approach to resist all attacks at detection side. Besides the unconditional security, people also seek for high key generation rate, but MDI-QKD has relatively low key generation rate. In this paper, we provide an efficient approach to increase the key generation rate of MDI-QKD by adopting multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs) of single photons to generate keys. Compared with other high-dimension MDI-QKD protocols encoding in one DOF, our protocol is more flexible, for our protocol generating keys in independent subsystems and the detection failure or error in a DOF not affecting the information encoding in other DOFs. Based on above features, our MDI-QKD protocol may have potential application in future quantum communication field.
Abstract Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI QKD) provides inherent immunity against attacks targeting practical measurement devices. Existing MDI QKD protocols all rely on Bell-state measurements (BSM) to establish correlations between the users. However, the success probability of linear-optics BSM is limited to 50%, which severely restricts the achievable key rate of MDI QKD. We propose a high-capacity MDI QKD protocol with entanglement-assisted linear-optical BSM. This protocol has three advantages. First, compared with the original MDI QKD, at least a 25% increase in the key rate can be achieved. Second, simulation results show that this protocol can effectively increase the maximum photon transmission distance of MDI QKD from 262 km to 272 km. Third, this protocol is feasible in a fully linear-optical system under current experimental conditions. Our protocol provides a potential approach for improving the performance of future quantum communication networks.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) brings the promise of communication with information-theoretic security but is limited in practice due to its susceptibility to noise, losses, and device imperfections. To address these challenges, we propose a robust high-dimensional (HD) one-sided device-independent QKD (1sDI-QKD) protocol and present a proof-of-principle experimental implementation using photons entangled in the transverse-spatial degree-of-freedom. We develop a systematic security analysis of HD 1sDI-QKD protocols, leveraging quantum steering to certify security, and evaluate achievable secret key rates for different measurement configurations and system dimensions using reverse reconciliation. Our analysis shows that increasing the dimension enhances robustness against both noise and loss. We then demonstrate the key experimental building blocks required for implementing the protocol: (a) a high-quality source of high-dimensional photonic entanglement, and (b) a fully programmable, high-dimensional multi-outcome measurement device operating in up to dimension 11. Using these components, we obtain positive key rates for all investigated dimensions under the fair-sampling assumption, with the highest key rates achieved for dimension d=7. Finally, we discuss the steps required for a practical, loophole-free implementation of 1sDI-QKD in realistic regimes of loss and noise.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) provides ultimate cryptographic security based on the laws of quantum mechanics. For point-to-point QKD protocols, the security of the generated key is compromised by detector side channel attacks. This problem can be solved with measurement-device-independent QKD (mdi-QKD). However, mdi-QKD has shown limited performances in terms of the secret key generation rate, due to postselection in the Bell measurements. We show that high-dimensional (Hi-D) encoding (qudits) improves the performance of current mdi-QKD implementations. The scheme is proven to be unconditionally secure even for weak coherent pulses with decoy states, while the secret key rate is derived in the single-photon case. Our analysis includes phase errors, imperfect sources, and dark counts to mimic real systems. Compared to the standard bidimensional case, we show an improvement in the key generation rate.
High-dimensional quantum key distribution (HD-QKD) possesses a higher noise-tolerance ability and secure key rate. In the work presented here, by developing a mapping method for multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs), we propose and implement a HD-QKD system with a quantum bit error rate as low as 0.57%. Our HD-QKD system can stably achieve high secure key rates and is composable, allowing one to build HD quantum networks compatible with multiple DOFs. The results indicate that the proposed scheme could bridge HD and two-dimensional terminals encoded in different DOFs and could support large-scale deployment of quantum networks with high performance. Our work significantly enhances the performance of HD-QKD and strengthens the practical applications of large-scale quantum networks in a hybrid way.
We present a high-dimensional measurement device-independent (MDI) quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol employing biphotons to encode information. We exploit the biphotons as qutrits to improve the tolerance to error rate. Qutrits have a larger quantum system; hence they carry more bits of classical information and have improved robustness against eavesdropping compared to qubits. Notably, our proposed protocol is independent of measurement devices, thus eliminating the possibility of side-channel attacks. Also, we employ the finite key analysis approach to study the performance of our proposed protocol under realistic conditions where finite resources are used. Furthermore, we simulated the secret key rate for the proposed protocol in terms of the transmission distance for different fixed amounts of signals. The results prove that this protocol achieves a considerable secret key rate for a moderate transmission distance of 90 km by using [Formula: see text] signals. Moreover, the expected secret key rate was simulated to examine our protocol's performance at various intrinsic error rate values, [Formula: see text] caused by misalignment and instability due to the optical system. These results show that reasonable key rates are achieved with a minimum data size of about [Formula: see text] signals which are realizable with the current technology. Thus, implementing MDI-QKD using finite resources while allowing intrinsic errors due to the optical system makes a giant step forward toward realizing practical QKD implementations.