Hacking commercial quantum cryptography systems by tailored bright illumination

By Lars Lydersen, C. Wiechers, Christoffer Wittmann, Dominique Elser, Johannes Skaar, Vadim Makarov. 2010

1,071 citations recorded by the source corpus.

By using bright pulses of light to ‘blind’ the avalanche photodiode detectors used in quantum cryptography equipment, scientists in Europe have shown that it is possible to tracelessly steal the secret encryption key generated by such systems and thus compromise their security.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cdc4c170ceb15eadc3e61d58bd2280e06559b8b5

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Secure quantum key distribution with realistic devices (2020, background): “…Timing information Experiment 2007 Phase remapping (Fung et al., 2007; Xu et al., 2010) Source 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…”
Quantum eavesdropping without interception: an attack exploiting the dead time of single-photon detectors (2011, background): “New Journal of Physics 11, 065003 [26] Lydersen L, Wiechers C, Wittmann C, Elser D, Skaar J and Makarov V 2010 Hacking commercial quantum cryptography systems by tailored bright illumination.”
Tight finite-key analysis for quantum cryptography (2011, background): “In fact, if it is not satisﬁed (which is the case for some implementations) a loophole arises that can be used to eavesdrop on the key without being detected [40].”
Long-term performance of the SwissQuantum quantum key distribution network in a field environment (2011, background): “Its importance has been recognized by the research community since the middle of 2010 [27, 28].”
The Impact of Quantum Computing on Present Cryptography (2018, methodology): “Worthy to mentioning is that this method of communication was broken by Lydersen et al. in 2010 [53].”
Advances in quantum cryptography (2019, neutral): “[147–150]).”
Full-field implementation of a perfect eavesdropper on a quantum cryptography system. (2010, methodology): “We have chosen to exploit blindabil-ity and controllability of single-photon detectors under strong illumination 15,16 .”
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].”