Full-field implementation of a perfect eavesdropper on a quantum cryptography system.

By I. Gerhardt, Qin Liu, A. Lamas-Linares, Johannes Skaar, Christian Kurtsiefer, Vadim Makarov. Nature Communications, 2010

479 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) allows two remote parties to grow a shared secret key. Its security is founded on the principles of quantum mechanics, but in reality it significantly relies on the physical implementation. Technological imperfections of QKD systems have been previously explored, but no attack on an established QKD connection has been realized so far. Here we show the first full-field implementation of a complete attack on a running QKD connection. An installed eavesdropper obtains the entire 'secret' key, while none of the parameters monitored by the legitimate parties indicate a security breach. This confirms that non-idealities in physical implementations of QKD can be fully practically exploitable, and must be given increased scrutiny if quantum cryptography is to become highly secure.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7fcb2d74ecde9506138d1835c7da51a1f010e1e5

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum random number generators (2016, background): “For instance, in detector blinding attacks (Gerhardt et al., 2011; Lydersen et al., 2010), an attacker can selectively disable the detectors in the receiver and eliminate any randomness in the measurement, determining the result.”
Secure quantum key distribution (2014, background): “[84]. tion, it is usually relatively easy to incorporate imperfections of Alice’s state preparation process in the security proof [26, 92].”
High-rate measurement-device-independent quantum cryptography (2013, background): “While this theoretical analysis is fundamental for testing the basic security of a protocol, it may be insufficient to guarantee its viability in realistic implementations, where flaws in the devices may provide alternative ‘side-channels’ to be attacked [9, 10].”
Inside Quantum Repeaters (2015, background): “A number of field tests have already been demonstrated [20]–[23].”
High‐Dimensional Quantum Communication: Benefits, Progress, and Future Challenges (2019, background): “However, one-way protocols and technological imperfections of QKD devices open the possibility of successful eavesdropping methods, like side-channel attacks [155].”
Secure quantum key distribution with realistic devices (2020, background): “…Phase modulator Experiment∗ 2010 Detector blinding (Lydersen et al., 2010b; Makarov, 2009) Detection Detector Experiment∗ 2010 Detector blinding (Gerhardt et al., 2011a,b) Detection Detector Experiment 2011 Detector control (Lydersen et al., 2011a; Wiechers et al., 2011) Detection Detector…”
Progress in satellite quantum key distribution (2017, background): “Side-channel attacks on QKD hardware that require access to the optical link [36] can face significant challenges in satellite scenarios where the optical link is moving relatively quickly.”
Quantum technology for military applications (2021, background): “Especially in relation to quantum networks and in particular to QKD, we speak about quantum hacking [151, 152, 153, 154, 155], which has developed hand in hand with QKD itself.”
Advances in quantum cryptography (2019, unknown): “[147–150]).”