Local oscillator fluctuation opens a loophole for Eve in practical continuous-variable quantum-key-distribution systems

By Xiang-Chun Ma, Shihai Sun, Mu-Sheng Jiang, L. Liang. 2013

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider the security of practical continuous-variable quantum-key-distribution implementation with the local oscillator (LO) fluctuating in time, which opens a loophole for Eve to intercept the secret key. We show that Eve can simulate this fluctuation to hide her Gaussian collective attack by reducing the intensity of the LO. Numerical simulations demonstrate that if Bob does not monitor the LO intensity and does not scale his measurements with the instantaneous intensity values of LO, the secret key rate will be compromised severely.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1691b19820f8548fc00fa40d5d897d7655fe8fdc

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Continuous‐Variable Quantum Key Distribution with Gaussian Modulation—The Theory of Practical Implementations (2017, background): “On the other hand, in these implementations the local oscillator (a strong laser signal required to measure the quantum signals) is transmitted to the receiver over the quantum channel and is therefore accessible to possible manipulations by an eavesdropper – a deficiency which opens a number of sev”
Secure quantum key distribution with realistic devices (2020, background): “…randomization Experiment 2012 Memory attacks (Barrett et al., 2013) Detection Classical memory Theory 2013 Local oscillator (Jouguet et al., 2013a; Ma et al., 2013b)∗∗ Detection Local oscillator Experiment 2013 Trojan horse (Jain et al., 2014, 2015) Source&Detection Backflection light…”
Advances in quantum cryptography (2019, unknown): “First, due to channel loss, the power of the LO at the receiver is strongly reduced and thus in some cases insufficient for proper homodyne detection, second, the large power of the LO in the fiber scatters photons and thus disturbs the other quantum or classical fiber channels [460, 465, 468], and ”
Distributing Secret Keys with Quantum Continuous Variables: Principle, Security and Implementations (2015, methodology): “Attacks based on the LO typically involve control of its intensity [75,76], and so, a monitoring detector at the entrance of Bob’s site is useful in this case.”