Towards practical and fast Quantum Cryptography

TL;DR

This paper introduces a practical quantum cryptography protocol using weak coherent pulses, featuring a simple measurement scheme and monitoring line to detect eavesdropping, with performance comparable to existing protocols.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new quantum cryptography protocol optimized for practical implementation with weak coherent pulses and simple detection methods.

Findings

Protocol performs as well as standard protocols against zero-error attacks

Key rate decreases only linearly with channel transmission

Two types of eavesdropping attacks are analyzed and detected

Abstract

We present a new protocol for practical quantum cryptography, tailored for an implementation with weak coherent pulses. The key is obtained by a very simple time-of-arrival measurement on the data line; an interferometer is built on an additional monitoring line, allowing to monitor the presence of a spy (who would break coherence by her intervention). Against zero-error attacks (the analog of photon-number-splitting attacks), this protocol performs as well as standard protocols with strong reference pulses: the key rate decreases only as the transmission $t$ of the quantum channel. We present also two attacks that introduce errors on the monitoring line: the intercept-resend, and a coherent attack on two subsequent pulses. Finally, we sketch several possible variations of this protocol.