The Quantum Cryptography Approach: Unleashing the Potential of Quantum Key Reconciliation Protocol for Secure Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel quantum key reconciliation protocol that enhances secure communication by preventing basis leakage and using polynomial interpolation for eavesdropper detection, implemented on IBM quantum computers.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new quantum cryptography method that ensures secure key generation without basis leakage and incorporates noise analysis using IBM's quantum hardware.

Findings

Successful key generation probability remains at 50% under maximum noise.

The protocol effectively detects eavesdropping using polynomial interpolation.

Noise impact on success probability is analyzed across different qubit counts.

Abstract

Quantum cryptography is the study of delivering secret communications across a quantum channel. Recently, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) has been recognized as the most important breakthrough in quantum cryptography. This process facilitates two distant parties to share secure communications based on physical laws. The BB84 protocol was developed in 1984 and remains the most widely used among BB92, Ekert91, COW, and SARG04 protocols. However the practical security of QKD with imperfect devices have been widely discussed, and there are many ways to guarantee that generated key by QKD still provides unconditional security. This paper proposed a novel method that allows users to communicate while generating the secure keys as well as securing the transmission without any leakage of the data. In this approach sender will never reveal her basis, hence neither the receiver nor the intruder will get knowledge of the fundamental basis.Further to detect Eve, polynomial interpolation is also used as a key verification technique. In order to fully utilize the quantum computing capabilities provided by IBM quantum computers, the protocol is executed using the Qiskit backend for 45 qubits. This article discusses a plot of % error against alpha (strength of eavesdropping). As a result, different types of noise have been included, and the success probability of the desired key bits has been determined. Furthermore, the success probability under depolarizing noise is explained for different qubit counts.Last but not least, even when the applied noise is increased to maximum capacity, a 50% probability of successful key generation is still observed in an experiment.