Security Proof Against Collective Attacks for an Experimentally Feasible Semiquantum Key Distribution Protocol

TL;DR

This paper proves the security of the experimentally feasible Mirror semiquantum key distribution protocol against collective attacks, establishing its robustness in noisy conditions and determining the secure key rate limits.

Contribution

It provides the first security proof of the Mirror protocol against collective attacks, including noise tolerance and key rate analysis.

Findings

Security against collective attacks established

Noise threshold for secure key distribution determined

Key rate under realistic noise conditions evaluated

Abstract

Semiquantum key distribution (SQKD) allows two parties (Alice and Bob) to create a shared secret key, even if one of these parties (say, Alice) is classical. However, most SQKD protocols suffer from severe practical security problems when implemented using photons. The recently developed "Mirror protocol" [Boyer, Katz, Liss, and Mor, Phys. Rev. A 96, 062335 (2017)] is an experimentally feasible SQKD protocol overcoming those drawbacks. The Mirror protocol was proven robust (namely, it was proven secure against a limited class of attacks including all noiseless attacks), but its security in case some noise is allowed (natural or due to eavesdropping) has not been proved yet. Here we prove security of the Mirror protocol against a wide class of quantum attacks (the "collective attacks"), and we evaluate the allowed noise threshold and the resulting key rate.