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arXiv:quant-ph/0608195 · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Quantum Key Distribution Based on Private States: Unconditional Security Over Untrusted Channels With Zero Quantum Capacity

Karol Horodecki, Michał Horodecki, Paweł Horodecki, Debbie Leung, Jonathan Oppenheim

Published May 29, 2008• 69 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1109/tit.2008.921870

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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.
Prepare and measure quantum key distribution protocols can be decomposed into two basic steps: delivery of the signals over a quantum channel and distillation of a secret key from the signal and measurement records by classical processing and public communication. Here we formalize the distillation process for a general protocol in a purely quantum-mechanical framework and demonstrate that it can be viewed as creating an ``effective'' quantum channel between the legitimate users Alice and Bob. The process of secret key generation can then be viewed as entanglement distribution using this channel, which enables application of entanglement-based security proofs to essentially any prepare and measure protocol. To ensure secrecy of the key, Alice and Bob must be able to estimate the channel noise from errors in the key, and we further show how symmetries of the distillation process simplify this task. Applying this method, we prove the security of several key distribution protocols based on equiangular spherical codes.
In this Letter, we prove the unconditional security of the single-photon differential phase shift quantum key distribution (DPS-QKD) protocol, based on the conversion to an equivalent entanglement-based protocol. We estimate the upper bound of the phase error rate from the bit error rate, and show that the DPS-QKD protocol can generate an unconditionally secure key when the bit error rate is not greater than 4.12%. This proof is the first step to the unconditional security proof of a coherent state DPS-QKD.
We prove the unconditional security of a quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol on a noisy channel against the most general attack allowed by quantum physics. We use the fact that in a previous paper we have reduced the proof of the unconditionally security of this QKD protocol to a proof that a corresponding Quantum String Oblivious Transfer (String-QOT) protocol would be unconditionally secure against Bob if implemented on top of an unconditionally secure bit commitment schcmc. We prove a lemma that extends a security proof given by Yao for a (one bit) QOT protocol to this String-QOT protocol. This result and the reduction mentioned above implies the unconditional security of our QKD protocol despite our previous proof that unconditionally secure bit commitment schemes are impossible.
We present a simple method to obtain an upper bound on the achievable secret key rate in quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols that use only unidirectional classical communication during the public-discussion phase. This method is based on a necessary precondition for one-way secret key distillation; the legitimate users need to prove that there exists no quantum state having a symmetric extension that is compatible with the available measurements results. The main advantage of the obtained upper bound is that it can be formulated as a semidefinite program, which can be efficiently solved. We illustrate our results by analyzing two well-known qubit-based QKD protocols: the four-state protocol and the six-state protocol.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) offers the promise of absolutely secure communications. However, proofs of absolute security often assume perfect implementation from theory to experiment. Thus, existing systems may be prone to insidious side-channel attacks that rely on flaws in experimental implementation. Here we replace all real channels with virtual channels in a QKD protocol, making the relevant detectors and settings inside private spaces inaccessible while simultaneously acting as a Hilbert space filter to eliminate side-channel attacks. By using a quantum memory we find that we are able to bound the secret-key rate below by the entanglement-distillation rate computed over the distributed states.