Errors and their mitigation at the Kirchhoff-law-Johnson-noise secure key exchange

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to quantify and analyze error probabilities in KLJN secure key exchange, showing that longer measurement windows exponentially reduce errors, potentially eliminating the need for error correction.

Contribution

It provides a novel approach to quantify and mitigate errors in KLJN key exchange, demonstrating that error probabilities decrease exponentially with measurement duration.

Findings

Error probability decays exponentially with measurement time

Error correction may be unnecessary for sufficiently small error probabilities

Practical considerations confirm the feasibility of low-error key exchange

Abstract

A method to quantify the error probability at the Kirchhoff-law-Johnson-noise (KLJN) secure key exchange is introduced. The types of errors due to statistical inaccuracies in noise voltage measurements are classified and the error probability is calculated. The most interesting finding is that the error probability decays exponentially with the duration of the time window of single bit exchange. The results indicate that it is feasible to have so small error probabilities of the exchanged bits that error correction algorithms are not required. The results are demonstrated with practical considerations.