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IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics

Vulnerability in Free Space QKD Due to Detection Coupling Mismatch

Tanya Sharma, Ayan Biswas, Pooja Chandravanshi, Shashi Prabhakar, Ravindra Pratap Singh

Published Sep 25, 2023• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Practical implementations of QKD protocols involve devices which are not perfect, and an eavesdropper may exploit this to gain information leading to attacks. Here we have considered the effects of coupling mismatch between the detectors. We find possible information leakage to Eve due to coupling mismatch at the receiver’s detectors in terms of mutual information between the eavesdropper and receiver. The experiment has been performed for the Gaussian and Laguerre-Gaussian modes of the signal. This aspect becomes essential while implementing free space QKD using a satellite. The results suggest that accounting for detection coupling mismatch is crucial to avoid side-channel attacks.

DOI
10.1109/jqe.2023.3318585

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Practical implementations of QKD protocols involve devices which are not perfect, and an eavesdropper may exploit this to gain information leading to attacks. Here we have considered the effects of coupling mismatch between the detectors. We find possible information leakage to Eve due to coupling mismatch at the receiver’s detectors in terms of mutual information between the eavesdropper and receiver. The experiment has been performed for the Gaussian and Laguerre-Gaussian modes of the signal. This aspect becomes essential while implementing free space QKD using a satellite. The results suggest that accounting for detection coupling mismatch is crucial to avoid side-channel attacks.
The quantum key distribution protocol uses one degree of freedom of a single quantum system to encode information. If this information has correlations with the system's other degrees of freedom, or if the measurement efficiencies on the receiver side depend on them, a security loophole called side channel is created. An eavesdropper can exploit it to gain information without disturbing the system, and thus, without revealing the attack. Here, we analyze side channels in a free-space QKD sender and receiver implementation and focus especially on the dependencies and side channels for the spatial degree of freedom.
A typical implementation of BB84 protocol for quantum communication uses four laser diodes for transmitting weak coherent pulses, which may not have the same characteristics. We have characterized these lasers for mismatch in various parameters such as spectral width, pulse width, spatial mode, peak wavelength, polarization and their arrival times at the receiver. This information is utilized to calculate possible information leakage through side channel attacks by evaluating mutual information between source and eavesdropper. Based on our experimental observations of cross correlation between parameter values for different laser diodes, we suggest methods to reduce information leakage to Eve.
Practical implementations of quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols can introduce additional degrees of freedom in the quantum states that may render them distinguishable to an eavesdropper. This is the case of QKD systems using a different laser source to generate each quantum states, which can lead to temporal, spectral and/or spatial differences among them that can be exploited by a malicious party to extract information of the key. In this work we characterize, and experimentally verify, a side-channel attack on spatially distinguishable states against free-space QKD systems with misaligned laser sources. Specifically, for those emitting Gaussian beams, which is the most common case in free-space QKD. The attack makes theoretically unsafe any QKD system with any angular misalignment between the laser sources. Finally, we propose two countermeasures to eliminate the spatial distinguishability and secure the key exchange.
Security verification for the physical implementation of a cryptography system is an important step to ensure the security level promised by theory. As has been shown many times, any physical device has characteristics and behavior that deviate from theoretical expectations. Frequently, those lead to new security loopholes. \n \nThis thesis presents three experimental studies of attacks on quantum key distribution (QKD) systems. The first is the detection efficiency mismatch on free-space systems, which takes advantage of alignment imperfections in Bob's detector to control detection efficiencies. The experiment was done on a polarization-encoding free-space receiver to find the detection efficiencies of each detector for different spatial modes of an incoming photon. Those results were put into an optimization program, which modeled an intercept-and-resend attack on a non-decoy Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) protocol. The result shows that an adversary is able to gain information about the key without being detected by Alice and Bob. The second study is an experimental test of reliability of a spatial filter (a pinhole), which is proposed as a countermeasure for the previous attack. The result shows that, by sending a high-power laser beam focused on the pinhole, the pinhole can be widened without affecting other components in the receiver. Thus, the ability to perform a spatial mode detection efficiency-mismatch attack is recovered. The last experiment is a demonstration of Eve's ability to force a commercial system to distill a key from a raw key of a short length, where the asymptotic assumption of security claimed by the manufacturer might not hold. It was shown that this could be done by inducing transmission loss in the channel at an appropriate time.
Compared with the traditional BB84 protocol, the counterfactual quantum key distribution (QKD) does not rely on any signal travelling in the quantum channel, and therefore can present a security advantage where Eve cannot fully access signal. However, the practical system may be damaged in a scenario where the devices are untrusted. In this paper, we analyze the security of counterfactual QKD in untrusted detectors scenario. We show that the requirement to disclose "which detector clicked" has become the main loophole in all counterfactual QKD versions. An eavesdropping scheme which is similar to the memory attack on device-independent QKD could break its security by exploiting detectors' imperfections. We consider two different counterfactual QKD protocols and analyze their security against this major loophole. One is a modified Noh09 protocol, which would be secure in untrusted detectors context. Another is a variant of counterfactual QKD with high efficiency (Phys. Rev. A 104 (2021) 022424) against a series of detectors side-channel attacks as well as against other attacks that exploit detectors imperfections.