Security of six-state quantum key distribution protocol with threshold detectors

TL;DR

This paper proves the unconditional security of the six-state quantum key distribution protocol with threshold detectors, demonstrating its robustness and nearly identical error threshold to ideal qubit-based implementations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel technique to analyze security without a squash operator, extending security proof methods to practical six-state QKD with threshold detectors.

Findings

Bit error rate threshold is 12.611%, close to the ideal 12.619%.

Security proof applies to practical devices without a squash operator.

The six-state protocol remains robust with threshold detectors.

Abstract

We prove the unconditional security of the six-state protocol with threshold detectors and one-way classical communication. Unlike the four-state protocol (BB84), it has been proven that the squash operator for the six-state does not exist, i.e., the statistics of the measurements cannot be obtained via measurement on qubits. We propose a technique to determine which photon number states are important, and we consider a fictitious measurement on a qubit, which is defined through the squash operator of BB84, for the better estimation of Eve's information. As a result, we prove that the bit error rate threshold for the six-state protocol (12.611%) remains almost the same as the one of the qubit-based six-state protocol (12.619%). This clearly demonstrates the robustness of the six-state protocol against the use of the practical devices.