Quantum eavesdropping without interception: an attack exploiting the dead time of single-photon detectors

By H. Weier, H. Krauss, M. Rau, M. Fuerst, S. Nauerth, Harald Weinfurter. 2011

198 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The security of quantum key distribution (QKD) can easily be obscured if the eavesdropper can utilize technical imperfections in the actual implementation. Here, we describe and experimentally demonstrate a very simple but highly effective attack that does not need to intercept the quantum channel at all. Only by exploiting the dead time effect of single-photon detectors is the eavesdropper able to gain (asymptotically) full information about the generated keys without being detected by state-of-the-art QKD protocols. In our experiment, the eavesdropper inferred up to 98.8% of the key correctly, without increasing the bit error rate between Alice and Bob significantly. However, we find an even simpler and more effective countermeasure to inhibit this and similar attacks.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b3f1659e9fe898972c8c2a433d3fe9da2c60286d

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Secure quantum key distribution (2014, background): “Other possible imperfections that could be exploited include, for instance, the dead-time of the detectors [85].”
Micius quantum experiments in space (2022, methodology): “For time-shift attacks (Zhao et al., 2008) and dead-time attacks (Weier et al., 2011), the countermeasure was to operate the detector in freerunning mode, in which the detector records all the detection events and postselects the detection windows such that the detection efficiency is guaranteed to…”