We consider the security of the BB84, six-state and SARG04 quantum key distribution protocols when the eavesdropper doesn't have access to a quantum memory. In this case, Eve's most general strategy is to measure her ancilla with an appropriate POVM designed to take advantage of the post-measurement information that will be released during the sifting phase of the protocol. After an optimization on all the parameters accessible to Eve, our method provides us with new bounds for the security of six-state and SARG04 against a memoryless adversary. In particular, for the six-state protocol we show that the maximum QBER for which a secure key can be extracted is increased from 12.6% (for collective attacks) to 20.4% with the memoryless assumption.
We consider the security of the BB84, six-state and SARG04 quantum key distribution protocols when the eavesdropper doesn't have access to a quantum memory. In this case, Eve's most general strategy is to measure her ancilla with an appropriate POVM designed to take advantage of the post-measurement information that will be released during the sifting phase of the protocol. After an optimization on all the parameters accessible to Eve, our method provides us with new bounds for the security of six-state and SARG04 against a memoryless adversary. In particular, for the six-state protocol we show that the maximum QBER for which a secure key can be extracted is increased from 12.6% (for collective attacks) to 20.4% with the memoryless assumption.
We consider the security of the BB84 (Bennett and Brassard 1984 Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Computers, Systems, and Signal Processing pp 175–9), six-state (Bruß 1998 Phys. Rev. Lett. 81 3018 ) and SARG04 (Scarani et al 2004 Phys. Rev. Lett. 92 057901 ) quantum key distribution protocols when the eavesdropper does not have access to a quantum memory. In this case, Eve’s most general strategy is to measure her ancilla with an appropriate positive operator-valued measure designed to take advantage of the post-measurement information that will be released during the sifting phase of the protocol. After an optimization on all the parameters accessible to Eve, our method provides us with new bounds for the security of six-state and SARG04 against a memoryless adversary. In particular, for the six-state protocol we show that the maximum quantum bit error ratio for which a secure key can be extracted is increased from 12.6% (for collective attacks) to 20.4% with the memoryless assumption.
Quantum key distribution(QKD) could be the most significant application of quantum information theory. In nearly four decades, although substantial QKD protocols are developed, the BB84 protocol and its variants are still the most researched ones. It is well-known that the secure bound of qubit error rate(QBER) of BB84 protocol is about 11% while it can be increased to 12.6% by six-state protocol. It would not be surprising that employing more basis could increase the bound. However, what is the optimal one? In this paper, investigations of asymptotically optimal QKD protocols are proposed. Precisely, We present an abstraction of prepare-measure QKD protocols and investigate two special cases which are optimal among all protocols coding by the same states. Our analyses demonstrate that the asymptotically optimal QBER bounds coding by orthogonal qubits are about 22.17% for both general and memoryless attacks while the bounds coding by non-orthogonal states in two mutually unbiased basis are about 25.30% for general attacks and 27.00% for memoryless attacks. The significant improvement indicates the huge space for previous protocols to improve their security while the optimality of our protocols demonstrates the ultimate potential of their security.
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 .
Quantum cryptography, or, more precisely, quantum key distribution (QKD) allows two distant parties, Alice and Bob, to expand a previously shared secret key by sending quantum states through a quantum channel. The goal here is for Alice and Bob to communicate securely in the presence of an eavesdropper, Eve. The most well-known QKD protocol is the Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) protocol, which has been proved unconditionally secure against any attacks allowed by quantum mechanics. The main advantage of QKD over conventional cryptography is its absolute security. Thus, it is imperative to evaluate the security and performance of QKD protocols and realistic QKD systems. In this thesis, we study the security and performance aspects of QKD in four parts. In the first part, we study the Scarani-Acin-Ribordy-Gisin 2004 (SARG04) protocol. This protocol differs from the BB84 protocol only in the classical post-processing step and uses the same four quantum states as the BB84 protocol. We compared these two protocols and showed that in typical situations, the classical post-processing software for BB84 should be used in order to have a higher performance. In the second part, we prove the security of a three-state protocol. This protocol is similar to the BB84 protocol in that they share the same three qubit states. In the third part, we consider a practical Trojan horse attack on practical QKD systems implementing the BB84 protocol. The attack works by taking advantage of the finite response time of practical phase modulators to remap the states sent out by the legitimate user, Alice. We showed that if Alice and Bob are unaware of our attack, the final key shared between them can be compromised in some situations. In the fourth part, we consider another type of Trojan horse attack, which is based on mismatch between detection efficiencies of detectors. Practical detectors in QKD systems usually do not have identical efficiencies and an eavesdropper Eve may be able to exploit this efficiency mismatch to steal information about the final secret key. We analyze the security of the attack and show that it is possible for Eve to acquire some information on the final secret key if Alice and Bob are unaware of this attack.
An attempt to eavesdrop a quantum cryptographic channel reveals itself through errors it inevitably introduces into the transmission. We investigate the relationship between the induced error rate and the maximum amount of information the eavesdropper can extract, both in the two-state B92 and the four-state BB84 quantum cryptographic protocols. In each case, the optimal eavesdropping method that on average yields the most information for a given error rate is explicitly constructed. Analysis is limited to eavesdropping strategies where each bit of the quantum transmission is attacked individually and independently form other bits. Subject to this restriction, however, we believe that all attacks not forbidden by physical laws are included. Unlike previous work, the eavesdropper's advantage is measured in terms of Renyi information, and with respect only to bits received error-free by Bob. This alters both the maximum extractable information and the optimal eavesdropping attack. The result can be used directly at the privacy amplification stage of the protocol to accomplish secure communication over a noisy channel.
Abstract. The BB84 protocol is used by Alice (the sender) and Bob (the receiver) to settle on a secret classical bit-string by communicating qubits over an insecure quantum channel where Eve (the Eavesdropper) can have access. In this paper, we revisit a well known eavesdropping technique against BB84. We claim that there exist certain gaps in understanding the existing eavesdropping strategyin terms of cryptanalytic view and we try to bridge those gaps in this paper. First we refer to the result where it is shown that in the six-state variant of the BB84 protocol (Bruß, Phys. Rev. Lett., 1998), the mutual information between Alice (the sender) and Eve (the eavesdropper) is higher when two-bit probe is used compared to the one-bit probe and hencethetwo-bitprobeprovidesastrongereavesdroppingstrategy.However, from cryptanalytic point of view, we show that Eve has the same success probability in guessing the bit transmitted by Alice in both the cases of the two-bit and the one-bit probe. Thus, we point out that having higher mutual information may not directly lead to obtaining higher probability in guessing the key bit. It is also explained in the work of Bruß that the six-state variant of the BB84 protocol is more secure than the traditional four-state BB84. We look into this point in more detail and identify that this advantage is only achieved at the expense of communicating more qubits in the sixstate protocol. In fact, we present different scenarios, where given the same number of qubits communicated, the security comparison of the four and six-state protocols is evaluated carefully.