Receiver-device-independent quantum secure direct communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces a receiver-device-independent quantum secure direct communication protocol that leverages single-photon sources, achieving high efficiency and robustness, and is feasible with current technology.

Contribution

It proposes a novel RDI QSDC protocol that relies on trusted single-photon sources and treats receiving devices as black boxes, enhancing practicality and security.

Findings

Achieves 3415 times higher practical communication efficiency than DI QSDC.

Supports secure communication over 26 times longer distances than DI QSDC.

Maintains the same security level as MDI QSDC with improved practicality.

Abstract

Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) enables the message sender to directly send secure messages to the receiver through the quantum channel without keys. Device-independent (DI) and measurement-device-independent (MDI) QSDC protocols can enhance QSDC's practical security in theory. DI QSDC requires extremely high global detection efficiency and has quite low secure communication distance. DI and MDI QSDC both require high-quality entanglement. Current entanglement sources prepare entangled photon pairs with low efficiency, largely reducing their practical communication efficiency. In the paper, we propose a single-photon-based receiver-device-independent (RDI) QSDC protocol. It only relies on the trusted single-photon source, which is nearly on-demand under current technology, and treats all the receiving devices in both communication parties as ``black-boxes''. The parties ensure the message security only from the observed statistics. We develop a numerical method to simulate its performance in practical noisy communication situation. RDI QSDC provides the same security level as MDI QSDC. Compared with DI and MDI QSDC, RDI QSDC has some advantages. First, it uses the single-photon source and single-photon measurement, which makes it obtain the practical communication efficiency about 3415 times of that in DI QSDC and easy to implement. The whole protocol is feasible with current technology. Second, it has higher photon loss robustness and noise tolerance than DI QSDC, which enables it to have a secure communication distance about 26 times of that in DI QSDC. Based on above features, the RDI QSDC protocol makes it possible to achieve highly-secure and high-efficient QSDC in the near future.