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arXiv:quant-ph/0510067 · Physical Review Letters

Quantum Key Distribution Based on Arbitrarily Weak Distillable Entangled States

Karol Horodecki, Debbie Leung, Hoi‐Kwong Lo, Jonathan Oppenheim

Published Feb 21, 2006• 16 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

States with private correlations but little or no distillable entanglement were recently reported. Here, we consider the secure distribution of such states, i.e., the situation when an adversary gives two parties such states and they have to verify privacy. We present a protocol which enables the parties to extract from such untrusted states an arbitrarily long and secure key, even though the amount of distillable entanglement of the untrusted states can be arbitrarily small.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.96.070501

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States with private correlations but little or no distillable entanglement were recently reported. Here, we consider the secure distribution of such states, i.e., the situation when an adversary gives two parties such states and they have to verify privacy. We present a protocol which enables the parties to extract from such untrusted states an arbitrarily long and secure key, even though the amount of distillable entanglement of the untrusted states can be arbitrarily small.
In this paper, we prove unconditional security for a quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol based on distilling pbits (twisted ebits) from an arbitrary untrusted state that is claimed to contain distillable key. Our main result is that we can verify security using only public communication-via parameter estimation of the given untrusted state. The technique applies even to bound-entangled states, thus extending QKD to the regime where the available quantum channel has zero quantum capacity. We also show how to convert our purification-based QKD schemes to prepare/measure schemes.
We characterize the set of shared quantum states which contain a cryptographically private key. This allows us to recast the theory of privacy as a paradigm closely related to that used in entanglement manipulation. It is shown that one can distill an arbitrarily secure key from bound entangled states. There are also states that have less distillable private keys than the entanglement cost of the state. In general, the amount of distillable key is bounded from above by the relative entropy of entanglement. Relationships between distillability and distinguishability are found for a class of states which have Bell states correlated to separable hiding states. We also describe a technique for finding states exhibiting irreversibility in entanglement distillation.
We report experimental generation of a noisy entangled four-photon state that exhibits a separation between the secure key contents and distillable entanglement, a hallmark feature of the recently established quantum theory of private states. The privacy analysis, based on the full tomographic reconstruction of the prepared state, is utilized in a proof-of-principle key generation. The inferiority of distillation-based strategies to extract the key is exposed by an implementation of an entanglement distillation protocol for the produced state.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) is the most explored application of quantum information theory. A central problem in entanglement-based QKD (EB-QKD), is whether every entangled state can be used to extract a key. We observe that entanglement is not sufficient for standard practical EB-QKD protocols where the input choices are announced by the parties that want to share a secure key, such as E91 or entanglement-based BB84 type protocols, when even an arbitrarily small amount of leakage of classical side information occurs. We do this by identifying a class of two-qubit isotropic states that are entangled but cannot be used to distil the key under such protocols for any possible measurement by the parties. Counter-intuitively, this gap persists even when the leakage occurs from the "junk" rounds of the protocol, i.e, rounds that cannot be used to generate any key. We then extend this result to arbitrary dimensions and parties by identifying a class of isotropic states that are not useful to extract a secure key under such protocols, even if they are entangled. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach provides a tool to upper-bound the scalability of repeater-based QKD architectures in a protocol-independent manner. Interestingly, we find that allowing for even a tiny noise in the preparation drastically reduces the scalability of the QKD network.
An important contribution to the understanding of quantum key distribution has been the discovery of entangled states from which secret bits, but no maximally entangled states, can be extracted [Horodecki et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 200501 (2005)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.94.200501]. The construction of those states was based on an intuition that the quantum mechanical phenomena of data hiding and privacy might be related. In this Letter we firmly connect these two phenomena and highlight three aspects of this result. First, we simplify the definition of the secret key rate. Second, we give a formula for the one-way distillable entanglement of certain private states. Third, we consider the problem of extending the distance of quantum key distribution with help of intermediate stations, a setting called the quantum key repeater. We show that for protocols that first distill private states, it is essentially optimal to use the standard quantum repeater protocol based on entanglement distillation and entanglement swapping.
In this paper, we propose an efficient and deterministic quantum key distribution protocol for establishing a secret key between two untrusted users. In this protocol, a secret key is distributed to a sender and a receiver who share entangled states with a third trusted party but not with each other. This secret key is distributed by the means of special pure quantum states using remote state preparation and controlled gates. In addition, we employ the parity bits of the entangled pairs and the ancillary states to assist in preparing and measuring the secret states. Distributing a state to two users requires two maximally entangled pairs as the quantum channel and a two-particle von Neumann projective measurement. The proposed protocol is exact and deterministic. It distributes a secret key of d qubits by the means of 2d entangled pairs and, on average, d bits of classical communication. We demonstrate the security of this protocol against entanglement attacks and present a method of privacy amplification.