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Card Game to Demonstrate Quantum Key Exchange

Clayton S. Ferner

Published May 1, 2023• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

This demonstration shows how the BB84 quantum key exchange works by using playing cards. The game is played with three players (students) and an oracle (the instructor). The three players represent three characters, Alice, Eve, and Bob. The game is played with and without the participation of Eve. Bob and Alice try to exchange a series of random bits and try to determine if Eve is participating (eavesdropping).

DOI
10.1109/mitp.2023.3279688

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This demonstration shows how the BB84 quantum key exchange works by using playing cards. The game is played with three players (students) and an oracle (the instructor). The three players represent three characters, Alice, Eve, and Bob. The game is played with and without the participation of Eve. Bob and Alice try to exchange a series of random bits and try to determine if Eve is participating (eavesdropping).
Quantum cryptography uses quantum mechanics to guarantee secure communication. BB84 is a widely used quantum key distribution that provides a way for two parties, a sender, Alice, and a receiver, Bob, to share an unconditionally secure key in the presence of an eavesdropper, Eve. Three different criteria can be assumed to study the BB84 protocol. They are the efficiency of the protocol, the probability that Eve remains undetected, and the amount of knowledge Eve has about Alice's bit sequence. In a previous approach, we only considered the probability that Eve remains undetected. We viewed this protocol as a three player static game in which Alice and Bob were two cooperative players and Eve was a competitive one. In our game model, Alice's and Bob's objective was to maximize the probability of detecting Eve, while Eve's objective was to minimize this probability. In this paper, our previous effort is extended and we also consider the other two criteria, i.e. the efficiency of the protocol and the amount of knowledge Eve has about Alice's bit sequence. Using these models, we show how game theory can be used to find the strategies for Alice, Bob and Eve.
Quantum key distribution uses quantum mechanics to guarantee secure communication. BB84 is a widely used quantum key distribution that provides a way for two parties, a sender, Alice, and a receiver, Bob, to share an unconditionally secure key in the presence of an eavesdropper, Eve. In a new approach, we view this protocol as a three player static game in which Alice and Bob are two cooperative players and Eve is a competitive one. In our game model Alice’s and Bob’s objective is to maximize the probability of detecting Eve, while Eve’s objective is to minimize this probability. Using this model we show how game theory can be used to find the strategies for Alice, Bob and Eve.
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.