# Conference key agreement with single-photon interference

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a new multipartite quantum key agreement protocol using single-photon interference and W-class states, enhancing security and efficiency in high-loss quantum communication scenarios.

## Contribution

It generalizes twin-field QKD to a multipartite setting with a novel W-class entangled state, providing a secure conference key agreement scheme.

## Key findings

- Protocol is secure in finite-key regime
- Outperforms bipartite schemes under certain conditions
- Effective in high-loss quantum channels

## Abstract

The intense research activity on Twin-Field (TF) quantum key distribution (QKD) is motivated by the fact that two users can establish a secret key by relying on single-photon interference in an untrusted node. Thanks to this feature, variants of the protocol have been proven to beat the point-to-point private capacity of a lossy quantum channel. Here we generalize the main idea of the TF-QKD protocol introduced by Curty et al. to the multipartite scenario, by devising a conference key agreement (CKA) where the users simultaneously distill a secret conference key through single-photon interference. The new CKA is better suited to high-loss scenarios than previous multipartite QKD schemes and it employs for the first time a W-class state as its entanglement resource. We prove the protocol's security in the finite-key regime and under general attacks. We also compare its performance with the iterative use of bipartite QKD protocols and show that our truly multipartite scheme can be advantageous, depending on the loss and on the state preparation.