Thwarting the Photon Number Splitting Attack with Entanglement Enhanced BB84 Quantum Key Distribution

TL;DR

This paper proposes an entanglement-enhanced BB84 quantum key distribution protocol that improves security against photon-number-splitting attacks by exploiting photon phase and number non-commutation, offering a novel defense mechanism.

Contribution

It introduces a new QKD scheme using entanglement to detect eavesdroppers performing quantum non-demolition measurements, enhancing security over traditional methods.

Findings

Improved security against photon-number-splitting attacks.

Comparison with coherent decoy state protocol.

Potential advantages and disadvantages analyzed.

Abstract

We develop an improvement to the weak laser pulse BB84 scheme for quantum key distribution, which utilizes entanglement to improve the security of the scheme and enhance its resilience to the photon-number-splitting attack. This protocol relies on the non-commutation of photon phase and number to detect an eavesdropper performing quantum non-demolition measurement on number. The potential advantages and disadvantages of this scheme are compared to the coherent decoy state protocol.