Squashing Models for Optical Measurements in Quantum Communication

TL;DR

This paper develops a formalism to determine when optical measurement models can be simplified via squashing, enabling easier security analysis in quantum communication protocols like BB84.

Contribution

It introduces a method to verify the existence of squashing models for different quantum measurement setups, clarifying security assumptions in quantum key distribution.

Findings

BB84 measurements admit a squashing model

Six-state protocol measurements do not admit a squashing model

Security proofs for BB84 can assume single-photon forwarding

Abstract

Measurements with photodetectors necessarily need to be described in the infinite dimensional Fock space of one or several modes. For some measurements a model has been postulated which describes the full mode measurement as a composition of a mapping (squashing) of the signal into a small dimensional Hilbert space followed by a specified target measurement. We present a formalism to investigate whether a given measurement pair of mode and target measurements can be connected by a squashing model. We show that the measurements used in the BB84 protocol do allow a squashing description, although the six-state protocol does not. As a result, security proofs for the BB84 protocol can be based on the assumption that the eavesdropper forwards at most one photon, while the same does not hold for the six-state protocol.