Secure quantum routing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a secure quantum routing protocol that safeguards sender and receiver identities and message contents in quantum networks using simple linear optical components, without needing entanglement distribution.

Contribution

It presents a novel quantum routing protocol that ensures security and privacy with minimal hardware requirements and negligible impact on network capacity.

Findings

Protects sender and receiver identities from wiretappers

Uses only single photons, linear optics, and photon counters

Maintains high network capacity with negligible reduction

Abstract

We show that a quantum network can protect the identity of a sender and receiver from an external wiretapper. This new quantum communication protocol, which we call secure quantum routing, requires only single photons routed by linear optical elements and photon counters, and does not require distributing entanglement over multiple nodes or active feedforward. We prove that secure quantum routing protects both the contents of the message and the identity of the sender and receiver, and creates only a negligible reduction in the network channel capacity.