Modified Six State Cryptographic Protocol with Entangled Ancilla States

TL;DR

This paper proposes a modified six-state quantum key distribution protocol that remains secure and can generate secret keys even when an eavesdropper uses entangled ancilla states, surpassing the original protocol's limitations.

Contribution

It introduces a modification to the six-state QKD protocol allowing secret key generation despite entangled ancilla-based eavesdropping strategies.

Findings

Secret key can be generated even with high disturbance levels.

Mutual information depends on ancilla state concurrence.

Modified protocol outperforms Bruss's original six-state protocol.

Abstract

In a realistic situation, it is very difficult to communicate securely between two distant parties without introducing any disturbances. These disturbances might occur either due to external noise or may be due to the interference of an eavesdropper sitting in between the sender and the receiver. In this work, we probe here the existence of the possibility of the situation of generation of a secret key even if the eavesdropper is able to construct an entangled ancilla state in such a way that she can extract information from the intercepted qubit. To achieve this task, we consider and modify the six-state QKD protocol in which Eve can construct the unitary transformation that may make all ancilla components entangled at the output. Then, we calculate the mutual information between Alice and Bob and Alice and Eve, and identify the region where the secret key is generated even in the presence of Eve. We find that, in general, the mutual information of Alice and Eve depends not only on the disturbance D, but here we have shown that it also depends on the concurrence of the ancilla component states. We have further shown that it is possible to derive the disturbance-free mutual information of Alice and Eve, if Eve manipulates her entangled ancilla state in a particular manner. Thus, in this way, we are able to show that a secret key can be generated between Alice and Bob even if the disturbance is large enough. Moreover, we show that Bruss's six state QKD protocol failed to generate the secret key in the region where the modified six-state QKD protocol can generate the secret key.