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International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks

Flexible Blind Information Reconciliation for QKD based on Rateless Protograph LDPC codes

Marco Ferrari, Alberto Tarable, Rudi Paolo Paganelli

Published Jul 14, 2024• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Information Reconciliation (IR) is a crucial step in the process of distillation of unconditionally secure keys in Quantum key distribution (QKD). Novel IR rateless codes based on protograph low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been recently designed to replace Cascade. In this paper, a blind IR protocol is described that exploits all the features of rateless protograph LDPC codes.

DOI
10.1109/icton62926.2024.10648040

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Information Reconciliation (IR) is a crucial step in the process of distillation of unconditionally secure keys in Quantum key distribution (QKD). Novel IR rateless codes based on protograph low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been recently designed to replace Cascade. In this paper, a blind IR protocol is described that exploits all the features of rateless protograph LDPC codes.
Information Reconciliation (IR) is a key step in Quantum key distribution (QKD). In recent years, blind reconciliation based on low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes has replaced Cascade as a standardde facto, since it guarantees efficient information reconciliation without a priori quantum bit error rate estimation and with limited interactivity between the parties, which is essential in high key-rate and long distance QKD links. In this paper, a novel blind reconciliation scheme based on rateless protograph LDPC codes is proposed. The rate adaptivity, essential for blind reconciliation, is obtained by progressively splitting LDPC check nodes, which ensures a number of degrees of freedom larger than puncturing in code design. The protograph nature of the LDPC codes allows to use the same designed codes with a large variety of sifted-key lengths, enabling a blocklength flexibility, which is important in largely varying key-rate link conditions. The code design is based on a new protograph Discretized Density Evolution tool.
Information reconciliation is a crucial procedure in the classical post-processing of quantum key distribution (QKD). Poor reconciliation efficiency, revealing more information than strictly needed, may compromise the maximum attainable distance, while poor performance of the algorithm limits the practical throughput in a QKD device. Historically, reconciliation has been mainly done using close to minimal information disclosure but heavily interactive procedures, like \textit{Cascade}, or using less efficient but also less interactive ---just one message is exchanged--- procedures, like the ones based in low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The price to pay in the LDPC case is that good efficiency is only attained for very long codes and in a very narrow range centered around the quantum bit error rate (QBER) that the code was designed to reconcile, thus forcing to have several codes if a broad range of QBER needs to be catered for. Real world implementations of these methods are thus very demanding, either on computational or communication resources or both, to the extent that the last generation of GHz clocked QKD systems are finding a bottleneck in the classical part. In order to produce compact, high performance and reliable QKD systems it would be highly desirable to remove these problems. Here we analyse the use of short-length LDPC codes in the information reconciliation context using a low interactivity, \textit{blind}, protocol that avoids an a priori error rate estimation. We demonstrate that 2×1032 \times 10^32×103 bits length LDPC codes are suitable for blind reconciliation. Such codes are of high interest in practice, since they can be used for hardware implementations with very high throughput.
We study the information reconciliation (IR) scheme for quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols. The IR for the QKD can be seen as the asymmetric Slepian-Wolf problem, which low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can solve with efficient algorithms, i.e., the belief propagation. However, the LDPC codes are needed to be chosen properly from a collection of codes optimized for multiple key rates, which leads to complex decoder devices and performance degradation for unoptimized key rates. Therefore, it is desired that establish an IR scheme with a single LDPC code which supports multiple rates. To this end, in this paper, we propose an IR scheme with a rate-compatible non-binary LDPC code. Numerical results show the proposed scheme achieves IR efficiency comparable to the best know conventional IR scheme with lower decoding error rates.
With the rapid improvement of quantum computing technology, quantum key distribution(QKD) is a hot technology. Information reconciliation is a key step of QKD which is useful for correcting key error. Classical message interaction is necessary in a practical information reconciliation scheme, which makes the efficiency of these protocols decreased. Therefore, some one-way information reconciliation schemes based on low-density parity-check(LDPC) codes and polar codes are proposed. Here we propose a concatenated method of IR schemes which can achieve any given error rate level without the need of interactions. Compared with the one-way IR schems based on LDPC codes and polar codes, the IR schemes based on the proposed concatenated method can get lower bit error rates after error correction, which can also reduce the communication delay and system complexity of QKD, improve the final key generation rate and enhance the practicability of QKD system.
A significant breakthrough in space-based quantum key distribution (QKD) inaugurated by the Micius satellite has brought us closer to the era of global QKD networks. An essential step in the post-processing QKD is key reconciliation (KR), which eliminates the mismatch in the raw keys between two legitimate users. However, the fluctuation in the quantum bit-error rate (QBER) caused by the free-space optical (FSO) turbulence channels poses various challenges for the KR design. This paper addresses the design of blind KR schemes for FSO-based low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite QKD systems, which allow operating without a prior QBER estimation. Specifically, we present a novel blind KR scheme with a protograph low-density parity check (LDPC) code extension. The proposed LDPC structure is constructed by gradually extending and exhaustively searching among all possible solutions. The proposed design is evaluated in terms of the final key rate performance over the QKD systems using a dual-threshold/direct detection (DT/DD) scheme. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed design compared to the state-of-the-art design in different turbulence channel conditions.