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Two-way deterministic quantum key distribution against passive detector side channel attacks in the forward line

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Abstract

In the four-state two-way deterministic quantum key distribution (DQKD) protocol, Bob prepares a qubit randomly in one of four states and sends it to Alice. Alice encodes her key bit on the arrival qubit and returns it to Bob who measures the redux qubit to decode Alice’s key bit in a deterministic manner, without basis reconciliation. The unconditional security of the final key of this protocol has been proven in the ideal-device settings. Recently, it has been proven that two-way DQKD protocol is immune to all detector side channel attacks in the backward line A-to-B. In this paper, we study the security of two-way DQKD against passive detector side channel attacks in the forward line B-to-A. In a passive detector side channel attack, the eavesdropper Eve does not disturb quantum state of travel photon but utilizes the efficiency mismatch of two single-photon detectors to estimate the value of key bits, such as the time-shift attack. We prove that two-way DQKD is immune against all passive detector side channel attacks in the forward line B-to-A, although such attacks are efficient on BB84 protocol.

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Notes

  1. In fact, Ref. [27] was initially proposed as a quantum secure direct communication protocol with a reasonable N qubits in a batch. Recently, it was modified as a DQKD protocol to be applied to noisy quantum channels [33].

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Acknowledgments

I thank Qing-yu Cai for the fruitful discussions. Financial support from NSFC under Grant Nos. 11204072 and 61471356 is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Sciences, Hubei University of Technology, Wuhan, 430068, China

    Hua Lu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonances and Atomic and Molecular Physics, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430071, China

    Hua Lu

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Correspondence to Hua Lu.

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Lu, H. Two-way deterministic quantum key distribution against passive detector side channel attacks in the forward line. Quantum Inf Process 14, 3827–3834 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-015-1083-0

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