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Physical Review Letters

High-Rate Measurement-Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution under Intense Noise

Anonymous, Wei-Xin Xie, Chun-Mei Zhang, Guan‐Jie Fan‐Yuan, Yulong Wang, Yu-Xuan Fan, Shuang Wang, Zhen-Qiang Yin, Wei Chen, De‐Yong He, Guang‐Can Guo, Zhen-fu Han

Published Sep 9, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) is a promising path toward practical quantum communication, but current high-performance demonstrations come at prohibitive overhead and isolated environments. Here, we present a high-speed MDI-QKD system operating at an unprecedented repetition frequency of 2.5 GHz and verify its strong noise tolerance by incorporating the advantage distillation method. The secure key is efficiently generated under 425 kHz noise counts, which is 4 orders of magnitude higher than isolated systems. A secure key rate with a kbps level is achieved under 30 dB channel attenuation without bulky, resource-intensive detection devices. Our Letter establishes a complete practical solution for QKD deployment and resolves the persistent difficulty of realizing practical quantum secure networks with advanced security, a high key rate, environmental robustness, and physical compactness.

DOI
10.1103/1b8r-r248

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Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) is a promising path toward practical quantum communication, but current high-performance demonstrations come at prohibitive overhead and isolated environments. Here, we present a high-speed MDI-QKD system operating at an unprecedented repetition frequency of 2.5 GHz and verify its strong noise tolerance by incorporating the advantage distillation method. The secure key is efficiently generated under 425 kHz noise counts, which is 4 orders of magnitude higher than isolated systems. A secure key rate with a kbps level is achieved under 30 dB channel attenuation without bulky, resource-intensive detection devices. Our Letter establishes a complete practical solution for QKD deployment and resolves the persistent difficulty of realizing practical quantum secure networks with advanced security, a high key rate, environmental robustness, and physical compactness.
Abstract Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) is a technique for quantum-secured communication that eliminates all detector side-channels, although is currently limited by implementation complexity and low secure key rates. Here, we introduce a simple and compact MDI-QKD system design at gigahertz clock rates with enhanced resilience to laser fluctuations—thus enabling free-running semiconductor laser sources to be employed without spectral or phase feedback. This is achieved using direct laser modulation, carefully exploiting gain-switching and injection-locking laser dynamics to encode phase-modulated time-bin bits. Our design enables secure key rates that improve upon the state of the art by an order of magnitude, up to 8 bps at 54 dB channel loss and 2 kbps in the finite-size regime for 30 dB channel loss. This greatly simplified MDI-QKD system design and proof-of-principle demonstration shows that MDI-QKD is a practical, high-performance solution for future quantum communication networks.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) can serve large numbers of users with unconditional secure communication, in which measurement-device-independent (MDI) QKD protocol can conveniently enhance realistic security by eliminating all detector side channels. In multi-user scenarios, MDI-QKD networks should meet the requirements of reliability and robustness. Around the issues, we complete a series of work on performance improvement, low-cost deployment, and robust networking. First is to answer how to change the trusted node to the untrusted node with low cost, here we propose and demonstrate an MDIQKD which is compatible with phase encoding BB84 networks, allowing for economical deployment of MDI-QKD networks and reconciliation between high key rate and high realistic security in the same network. Then we make the MDI networks more robust. We design an MDI-QKD networking scheme for multi-user access where more than two users can generate keys synchronously regardless of aligning reference frames and compensating channel disturbance on polarization. Third, we find a general method to distil secure keys from quantum discord, which is different to the previous entanglement-based frameworks of MDI-QKD, allowing imperfect preparation and measurement of quantum states. The series of work can help the practical application of MDI-QKD networks, and promote the development of quantum networks.
Vulnerabilities and imperfections of single-photon detectors have been shown to compromise security for quantum key distribution (QKD). The measurement-device-independent QKD (MDI-QKD) appears to be the most appealing solution to solve the issues. However, in practice one faces severe obstacles of having significantly lower key generation rate, difficult two photon interferences, and remote synchronization etc. In this letter, we propose a highly efficient and simple quantum key distribution scheme to remove all of these drawbacks. Our proposal can be implemented with only small modifications over the standard decoy BB84 system. Remarkably it enjoys both the advantages of high key generation rate (being almost two orders of magnitude higher than that based on conventional MDI-QKD) comparable to the normal decoy system, and security against any detector side channel attacks. Most favorably one can achieve complete Bell state measurements with resort to single photon interference, which reduces significantly experimental costs. Our approach enables utilization of high speed and efficient secure communication, particularly in real-life scenario of both metropolitan and intercity QKD network, with an attack free fashion from arbitrary detector side channels.
Reference-frame-independent measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (RFI-MDI-QKD) eliminates detector side-channel attacks and avoids reference-frame calibration. While its feasibility has been widely demonstrated, existing implementations typically assume fixed or slowly drifting reference-frame misalignment, conditions rarely satisfied outside the laboratory. In realistic environments, rapid and free-running reference-frame variations can severely degrade both the key rate and transmission distance of conventional RFI-MDI-QKD. Here we propose a free-running RFI-MDI-QKD protocol that maintains high-rate key generation under rapid reference-frame variations. By introducing a classification-distillation method that reclassifies total detection events, secure keys can be extracted without modifying the experimental setup. Our protocol achieves a key rate more than nine times higher than the best previous RFI-MDI-QKD scheme and tolerates channel losses exceeding 24 dB, where earlier approaches fail. These results enable practical quantum key distribution on mobile platforms, including satellite-to-ground links and airborne nodes.
Quantum key distribution (QKD), which promises secure key exchange between two remote parties, is now moving toward the realization of scalable and secure QKD networks (QNs). Fully connected, trusted node-free QNs have been realized based on entanglement distribution, in which the low key rate and the large overhead make their practical application challenging. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a fully connected multi-user QKD network based on a wavelength-multiplexed measurement-device-independent (MDI) QKD protocol. By combining the MDI-QKD protocol with integrated optical frequency combs, we achieve an average secure key rate of 267 bits per second for about 30 dB of link attenuation per user pair—more than three orders of magnitude higher than previous entanglement-based works. More importantly, we realize communication between two different pairs of users simultaneously. Our work paves the way for the realization of large-scale QKD networks with full connectivity and simultaneous communication capability among multiple users.
Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) can eliminate all detector side channels and it is practical with current technology. Previous implementations of MDI-QKD all used two symmetric channels with similar losses. However, the secret key rate is severely limited when different channels have different losses. Here we report the results of the first high-rate MDI-QKD experiment over asymmetric channels. By using the recent 7-intensity optimization approach, we demonstrate>10×higher key rate than the previous best-known protocols for MDI-QKD in the situation of large channel asymmetry, and extend the secure transmission distance by more than 20-50 km in standard telecom fiber. The results have moved MDI-QKD towards widespread applications in practical network settings, where the channel losses are asymmetric and user nodes could be dynamically added or deleted.