Finite-correlation-secure quantum key distribution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel quantum key distribution protocol that is immune to all correlations of finite range, enhancing security by eliminating the need for correlation characterization and ensuring robustness against practical side-channel attacks.

Contribution

The proposed protocol is immune to all finite-range correlations, side-channel-secure, measurement-device-independent, and includes finite-key security analysis with numerical validation.

Findings

Small correlation ranges have minimal impact on performance

The protocol tolerates correlations spanning over 500 pulses

Finite-key security against coherent attacks is established

Abstract

Correlation between different pulses is a nettlesome problem in quantum key distribution (QKD). All existing solutions for this problem need to characterize the strength of the correlation, which may reduce the security of QKD to an accurate characterization. In this article, we propose a new protocol immune to all correlations of all dimensions, with the only requirements of non-entangled and finite-ranged correlation, and bounded vacuum probability. Additionally, the new protocol is side-channel-secure and measurement-device-independent, giving high-level security in practical QKD systems. We provide the finite-key security analysis against coherent attacks and conduct numerical simulations to see the performance. The result shows that a small correlation range does not influence the performance a lot and the protocol could tolerate a large correlation range, such as correlations spanning over 500 pulses.