Tomographic Quantum Cryptography: Equivalence of Quantum and Classical Key Distillation

By carrying out measurements on entangled states, two parties can generate a secret key which is secure not only against an eavesdropper bound by the laws of quantum mechanics, but also against a hypothetical "post-quantum" eavesdroppers limited by the no-signalling principle only. We introduce a family of quantum key distribution protocols of this type, which are more efficient than previous ones, both in terms of key rate and noise resistance. Interestingly, the best protoc...

We characterize the set of shared quantum states which contain a cryptographically private key. This allows us to recast the theory of privacy as a paradigm closely related to that used in entanglement manipulation. It is shown that one can distill an arbitrarily secure key from bound entangled states. There are also states which have less distillable private key than the entanglement cost of the state. In general the amount of distillable key is bounded from above by the rel...

We develop a formalism for distilling a classical key from a quantum state in a systematic way, expanding on our previous work on secure key from bound entanglement [K. Horodecki et. al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 94 (2005)]. More detailed proofs, discussion and examples are provided of the main results. Namely, we demonstrate that all quantum cryptographic protocols can be recast in a way which looks like entanglement theory, with the only change being that instead of distilling EPR ...

We describe how to achieve optimal entanglement generation and one-way entanglement distillation rates by coherent implementation of a class of secret key generation and secret key distillation protocols, respectively. This short paper is a high-level descrioption of our detailed papers [8] and [10].

We provide a general formalism to characterize the cryptographic properties of quantum channels in the realistic scenario where the two honest parties employ prepare and measure protocols and the known two-way communication reconciliation techniques. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition to distill a secret key using this type of schemes for Pauli qubit channels and generalized Pauli channels in higher dimension. Our results can be applied to standard protocols such ...

We thoroughly analyse the novel quantum key distribution protocol introduced recently in quant-ph/0412075, which is based on minimal qubit tomography. We examine the efficiency of the protocol for a whole range of noise parameters and present a general analysis of incoherent eavesdropping attacks with arbitrarily many steps in the iterative key generation process. The comparison with the tomographic 6-state protocol shows that our protocol has a higher efficiency (up to 20%) ...

Device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD) aims to achieve secure key distribution with only minimal assumptions, by basing its security on the violation of Bell inequalities. While this offers strong security guarantees, it comes at the cost of being challenging to implement experimentally. In this thesis, we present security proofs for several techniques that help to improve the keyrates and noise tolerance of DIQKD, such as noisy preprocessing, random key measurem...

In quantum information, the role of entanglement and disentanglement is itself a subject of research and debate. Earlier works on quantum cryptography have almost established that entanglement has no special advantage in quantum cryptography. In this paper we reveal that entanglement is better ingredient than disentanglement for our alternative quantum cryptography.

We analyze the security of quantum cryptography schemes for $d$-level systems using 2 or $d+1$ maximally conjugated bases, under individual eavesdropping attacks based on cloning machines and measurement after the basis reconciliation. We consider classical advantage distillation protocols, that allow to extract a key even in situations where the mutual information between the honest parties is smaller than the eavesdropper's information. In this scenario, advantage distillat...

In this work we present a security analysis for quantum key distribution, establishing a rigorous tradeoff between various protocol and security parameters for a class of entanglement-based and prepare-and-measure protocols. The goal of this paper is twofold: 1) to review and clarify the state-of-the-art security analysis based on entropic uncertainty relations, and 2) to provide an accessible resource for researchers interested in a security analysis of quantum cryptographic...