Attacking a practical quantum-key-distribution system with wavelength-dependent beam-splitter and multiwavelength sources

By Hongwei Li, Shuang Wang, Jing-Zheng Huang, Wei Chen, Zhen-Qiang Yin, Fang Li, Zhengwei Zhou, Dong Liu, Yang Zhang, G. Guo and 2 more. 2011

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is well known that the unconditional security of quantum-key distribution (QKD) can be guaranteed by quantum mechanics. However, practical QKD systems have some imperfections, which can be controlled by the eavesdropper to attack the secret key. With current experimental technology, a realistic beam splitter, made by fused biconical technology, has a wavelength-dependent property. Based on this fatal security loophole, we propose a wavelength-dependent attacking protocol, which can be applied to all practical QKD systems with passive state modulation. Moreover, we experimentally attack a practical polarization encoding QKD system to obtain all the secret key information at the cost of only increasing the quantum bit error rate from 1.3 to 1.4%.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0fb72a3a7204ba849c48db63103c0439671a0970

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Advances in quantum cryptography (2019, unknown): “[535] proposed a similar type of attack, in which they exploit the frequency-dependence of the beamsplitter to allow them to choose Bob’s basis with high probability.”
Quantum random number generators (2016, background): “The generator of (Li et al., 2011) can generate multiple bit streams using a wavelength multiplexed configuration where the light from the superluminescent diode is divided into many channels with bandpass filters for different frequency bands.”
Secure quantum key distribution with realistic devices (2020, background): “…et al., 2011) Detection Detector Experiments 2011 Faraday mirror (Sun et al., 2011) Source Faraday mirror Theory 2011 Wavelength (Huang et al., 2013; Li et al., 2011) Detection Beam-splitter Experiment 2011 Dead-time (Henning et al., 2011) Detection Detector Experiment 2011 Channel calibration…”