Simple proof of security of the BB84 quantum key distribution protocol

By Peter W. Shor, John Preskill. Physical Review Letters, 2000

2,671 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We prove that the 1984 protocol of Bennett and Brassard (BB84) for quantum key distribution is secure. We first give a key distribution protocol based on entanglement purification, which can be proven secure using methods from Lo and Chau's proof of security for a similar protocol. We then show that the security of this protocol implies the security of BB84. The entanglement purification based protocol uses Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes, and properties of these codes are used to remove the use of quantum computation from the Lo-Chau protocol.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff2df7e14b5046102c5149e8f045daeebd7b05ad

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Citations in the corpus

Secure quantum key distribution with realistic devices (2020, methodology): “This is also a crucial assumption in security proofs (Lo and Chau, 1999; Shor and Preskill, 2000), as shown in Section II.”
Homological error correction: Classical and quantum codes (2006, background): “In particular, the celebrated Shor’s original 9 qubit code can be thought of as a homological quantum code belonging to a family of codes [[d2, 1, d]], with d = 3 (see fig.”
Time-shift attack in practical quantum cryptosystems (2005, background): “One of the most important practical application of quantum information is quantum key distribution (QKD), whose unconditional security is based on the fundamental law of quantum mechanics [1–6].”
The Mathematical Language of Quantum Theory: From Uncertainty to Entanglement (2012, background): “Proofs of unconditional security of BB84 can be found in [97] and [130].”
Authentication of quantum messages (2001, methodology): “1, we rely on the security of the modified Lo-Chau purification protocol, due to Shor and Preskill [14] .”
Twisted photons: new quantum perspectives in high dimensions (2017, neutral): “For qubit systems, this bound has been proven to be as low as approximately 11 or 12.6% if two or three mutually unbiased bases are taken into account, respectively 31 – 33 .”
Phase-Matching Quantum Key Distribution (2018, methodology): “First, we brieﬂy review the main results of the Lo-Chau [4] and Shor-Preskill [5] security proofs in Section A 1.”
Quantum random number generation (2015, methodology): “The technique used in the protocol shares strong similarity with the one used in QKD.(82) The X basis measurement can be understood as the phase error estimation, from which we can estimate the amount of classical noise.”
Quantum key distribution with entangled photon sources (2007, background): “[5], we know that the probability to get a ǫ bias is Pǫ ≤ exp[− ǫ(2)n 4δb(1 − δb) ], (13)”