Quantum Internet in a Nutshell -- Advancing Quantum Communication with Ion Traps

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the emulation of quantum communication protocols on ion-trap quantum computers, exploring noise effects, security attacks, and the potential of quantum error correction to enhance quantum key distribution security.

Contribution

It introduces a practical platform for emulating quantum communication protocols, including attacks and noise, and investigates quantum error correction as a privacy authentication method.

Findings

Quantum error correction can suppress noise in QKD protocols.

Noise profiling can help detect eavesdropping activities.

Emulation platform enables testing of security attacks and defenses.

Abstract

Quantum Internet in a Nutshell (QI-Nutshell) connects the fields of quantum communication and quantum computing by emulating quantum communication protocols on currently available ion-trap quantum computers. We demonstrate emulations of QKD protocols where the individual steps are mapped to physical operations within our hardware platform. This allows us to not only practically execute established protocols such as BB84 or BBM92, but also include cloning attacks by an eavesdropping party, noise sources and side-channel attacks that are generally hard to include in theoretical QKD security proofs. We deliberately inject noise and investigate its effect on quantum communication protocols. We employ numerical simulations in order to study the incorporation of small quantum error correction (QEC) codes into QKD protocols. We find that these codes can help to suppress the noise level and to monitor the noise profile of the channel. This may enable the communicating parties to detect suspicious deviations from expected noise characteristics as a result of potential eavesdropping. This suggests that QEC may serve as a means of privacy authentication for quantum communication without altering the transmitted quantum information.