The breakdown flash of silicon avalanche photodiodes-back door for eavesdropper attacks?

By Christian Kurtsiefer, P. Zarda, S. Mayer, Harald Weinfurter. 2001

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Silicon avalanche photodiodes are the most sensitive photodetectors in the visible to near-infrared region for a wavelength <1000 nm. However, when they are used for single photon detection in a Geiger mode, they are known to emit light on the controlled breakdown used to detect a photoelectron. This fluorescence light might have serious impacts on experimental applications like quantum cryptography or single-particle spectroscopy. We characterized the fluorescence behaviour of silicon avalanche photodiodes in the experimentally simple passive quenching configuration and discuss implications for their use in quantum cryptography systems.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/283487c6ea6fbb91b099cdc1bfdaf40f304d2f89

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

The security of practical quantum key distribution (2008, background): “Actually, the first kind of hacking attack that was considered is a form of Trojan Horse that would come for free: it was in fact noticed that some photon counters (siliconbased avalanche photo-diodes) emit some light at various wavelengths when they detect a photon (Kurtsiefer et al., 2001).”
Single-photon detectors for optical quantum information applications (2009, background): “Photon emission by hot carriers in an avalanche current ('backflash' photons) can potentially be exploited by eavesdroppers in QKD scheme”
Secure quantum key distribution with realistic devices (2020, background): “…Manner Year Photon-number-splitting (Brassard et al., 2000; Lütkenhaus, 2000) Source WCP (multi-photons) Theory 2000 Detector fluorescence (Kurtsiefer et al., 2001) Detection Detector Theory 2001 Faked-state (Makarov et al., 2006; Makarov and Hjelme, 2005) Detection Detector Theory 2005…”
Long-term performance of the SwissQuantum quantum key distribution network in a field environment (2011, background): “Quantum hacking has been studied for at least ten years [25, 26] and this has been particularly active over the last couple of years.”