Entanglement generation secure against general attacks

TL;DR

This paper provides a security proof for entanglement generation over noisy channels, ensuring confidentiality even with imperfect devices and arbitrary noise, crucial for secure distributed quantum computing.

Contribution

It introduces a security proof for entanglement distillation protocols under general noise conditions, including imperfect devices and non-i.i.d. inputs, advancing quantum communication security.

Findings

Secure entanglement can be established over noisy channels with imperfect devices.

The proof applies to arbitrary channel noise and noisy local operations.

Protocols are effective even if the eavesdropper learns the noise characteristics.

Abstract

We present a security proof for establishing private entanglement by means of recurrence-type entanglement distillation protocols over noisy quantum channels. We consider protocols where the local devices are imperfect, and show that nonetheless a confidential quantum channel can be established, and used to e.g. perform distributed quantum computation in a secure manner. While our results are not fully device independent (which we argue to be unachievable in settings with quantum outputs), our proof holds for arbitrary channel noise and noisy local operations, and even in the case where the eavesdropper learns the noise. Our approach relies on non-trivial properties of distillation protocols which are used in conjunction with de-Finetti and post-selection-type techniques to reduce a general quantum attack in a non-asymptotic scenario to an i.i.d. setting. As a side result, we also provide entanglement distillation protocols for non-i.i.d. input states.