Security of Differential Phase Shift Quantum Key Distribution

Abstract:

The design of quantum protocols for secure key generation poses many challenges: on the one hand, they need to be practical concerning experimental realisations. On the other hand, their theoretical description must be simple enough to allow for a security proof against all possible attacks. Often, these two requirements are in conflict with each other, and the differential phase shift (DPS) QKD protocol exemplifies these difficulties: it is designed to be implementable with current optical telecommunication technology, which, for this protocol, comes at the cost that many standard security proof techniques do not apply to it. After about 20 years since its invention, this work presents the first full security proof of DPS QKD against general attacks, including finite-size effects. The proof combines techniques from quantum information theory, quantum optics, and relativity. We first give a security proof of a QKD protocol whose security stems from relativistic constraints. We then show that DPS QKD can be formulated as an instance of the relativistic protocol. In addition, we show that coherent attacks on the DPS protocol are, in fact, stronger than collective attacks.

Paper reference:

Security of differential phase shift QKD from relativistic principles, Martin Sandfuchs, Marcus Haberland, V. Vilasini, Ramona Wolf, external page https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11340