Upper bounds on the secret-key-agreement capacity of a quantum channel serve as a way to assess the performance of practical quantum-key-distribution protocols conducted over that channel. In particular, if a protocol employs a quantum repeater, achieving secret-key rates exceeding these upper bounds is a witness to having a working quantum repeater. In this paper, we extend a recent advance [Liuzzo-Scorpo et al., arXiv:1705.03017] in the theory of the teleportation simulation of single-mode phase-insensitive Gaussian channels such that it now applies to the relative entropy of entanglement measure. As a consequence of this extension, we find tighter upper bounds on the non-asymptotic secret-key-agreement capacity of the lossy thermal bosonic channel than were previously known. The lossy thermal bosonic channel serves as a more realistic model of communication than the pure-loss bosonic channel, because it can model the effects of eavesdropper tampering and imperfect detectors. An implication of our result is that the previously known upper bounds on the secret-key-agreement capacity of the thermal channel are too pessimistic for the practical finite-size regime in which the channel is used a finite number of times, and so it should now be somewhat easier to witness a working quantum repeater when using secret-key-agreement capacity upper bounds as a benchmark.
We investigate cat codes that can correct multiple excitation losses and identify two types of logical errors: bit-flip errors due to excessive excitation loss and dephasing errors due to quantum back-action from the environment. We show that selected choices of logical subspace and coherent amplitude can efficiently reduce dephasing errors. The trade-off between the two major errors enables optimized performance of cat codes in terms of minimized decoherence. With high coupling efficiency, we show that one-way quantum repeaters with cat codes feature drastically boosted secure communication r…
We consider a protocol for sharing quantum states using continuous variable systems. Specifically we introduce an encoding procedure where bosonic modes in arbitrary secret states are mixed with several ancillary squeezed modes through a passive interferometer. We derive simple conditions on the interferometer for this encoding to define a secret sharing protocol and we prove that they are satisfied by almost any interferometer. This implies that, if the interferometer is chosen uniformly at random, the probability that it may not be used to implement a quantum secret sharing protocol is zero.…
Bosonic channels describe quantum-mechanically many practical communication links such as optical, microwave, and radiofrequency. We investigate the maximum rates for the bosonic multiple access channel (MAC) in the presence of thermal noise added by the environment and when the transmitters utilize Gaussian state inputs. We develop an outer bound for the capacity region for the thermal-noise lossy bosonic MAC. We additionally find that the use of coherent states at the transmitters is capacity-achieving in the limits of high and low mean input photon numbers. Furthermore, we verify that coher…
Upper bounds for private communication over quantum channels can be derived by adopting channel simulation, protocol stretching, and relative entropy of entanglement. All these ingredients have led to single-letter upper bounds to the secret key capacity which can be directly computed over suitable resource states. For bosonic Gaussian channels, the tightest upper bounds have been derived by employing teleportation simulation over asymptotic resource states, namely the asymptotic Choi matrices of these channels. In this work, we adopt a different approach. We show that teleporting over an anal…
The theory of quantum cryptography aims to guarantee unconditional information-theoretic security against an omnipotent eavesdropper. In many practical scenarios, however, the assumption of an all-powerful adversary is excessive and can be relaxed considerably. In this paper we study secret key distillation across a lossy and noisy quantum wiretap channel between Alice and Bob, with a separately parameterized realistically lossy quantum channel to the eavesdropper Eve. We show that under such restricted eavesdropping, the key rates achievable can exceed the secret key distillation capacity aga…
The field of quantum communications promises the faithful distribution of quantum information, quantum entanglement, and absolutely secret keys, however, the highest rates of these tasks are fundamentally limited by the transmission distance between quantum repeaters. The ultimate end-to-end rates of quantum communication networks are known to be achievable by an optimal entanglement distillation protocol followed by teleportation. In this work, we give a practical design for this achievability. Our ultimate design is an iterative approach, where each purification step operates on shared entan…
Security flaw of counterfactual quantum cryptography in practical setting
最近，T. G. Noh [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103，230501（2009）]成为量子密码学中一个有趣的方向，并已被一些研究人员（如Y. Liu等人的[Phys.Rev.Lett. 109，030501（2012）]）。然而，我们发现，它是不安全的，在实际的高损耗信道设置。分析了在有耗信道中极化分裂测量攻击下的密钥速率。分析表明，当单向信道的丢失率超过$50%$时，协议是不安全的。
Lossy bosonic channels play an important role in a number of quantum information tasks, since they well approximate thermal dissipation in an experiment. Here, we characterize their metrological power in the idler-free and entanglement-assisted cases, using respectively single- and two-mode Gaussian states as probes. In the problem of estimating the lossy parameter, we study the energy-constrained quantum Fisher information (QFI) for generic temperature and lossy parameter regimes, showing qualitative behaviours of the optimal probes. We show semi-analytically that the two-mode squeezed-vacuum…
Conference key agreement (CKA) is an information processing task where more than two parties want to share a common secret key. Here, we present a loss-resilient protocol for CKA, based on redundant encoding and error correction. Our protocol provides a speed-up in transmission rate over the existing lossy CKA protocol. However, encoding and error correction come with extra cost. We show that, using photon sources with creation probability p > 0.3, our protocol's secret key rate can overcome the existing protocol's. Hence, high probability entangled photon sources are required for realistic im…
We show that a collection of lossy multi-chromatically modulated qubits can be used to dissipatively engineer arbitrary Gaussian states of a set of bosonic modes. Our ideas are especially suited to superconducting-circuit architectures, where all the required ingredients are experimentally available. The generation of such multimode Gaussian states is necessary for many applications, most notably measurement-based quantum computation. We build upon some of our previous proposals, where we showed how to generate single-mode and two-mode squeezed states through cooling and lasing. Special care m…
We investigate the quantum-secure covert-communication capabilities of lossy thermal-noise bosonic channels, the quantum-mechanical model for many practical channels. We determine the expressions for the covert capacity of these channels: $L_{\text{no-EA}}$, when Alice and Bob share only a classical secret, and $L_{\text{EA}}$, when they benefit from entanglement assistance. We find that entanglement assistance alters the fundamental scaling law for covert communication. Instead of $L_{\text{no-EA}}\sqrt{n}-r_{\text{no-EA}}(n)$, $r_{\text{no-EA}}(n)=o(\sqrt{n})$, entanglement assistance allows…
Secret sharing is a multi-party cryptographic primitive that can be applied to a network of partially distrustful parties for encrypting data that is both sensitive (it must remain secure) and important (it must not be lost or destroyed). When sharing classical secrets (as opposed to quantum states), one can distinguish between protocols that leverage bi-partite quantum key distribution (QKD) and those that exploit multi-partite entanglement. The latter class are known to be vulnerable to so-called participant attacks and, while progress has been made recently, there is currently no analysis t…
Secret-sharing building blocks based on quantum broadcast communication are studied. The confidential capacity region of the pure-loss bosonic broadcast channel is determined, both with and without key assistance, and an achievable region is established for the lossy bosonic broadcast channel. If the main receiver has a transmissivity of η<1/2, then confidentiality solely relies on the key-assisted encryption of the one-time pad. We also address conference key agreement for the distillation of two keys, a public key and a secret key. A regularized formula is derived for the key-agreement capac…
Quantum technologies able to manipulating single quantum systems, are presently developing. Among the dowries of the quantum realm, entanglement is one of the basic resources for the novel quantum revolution. Within this context, one is faced with the problem of protecting the entanglement when a system state is manipulated. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the classical driving field on the generation entanglement between two qubits interacting with a bosonic environment. We discuss the effect of the classical field on the generation of entanglement between two (different) qubits a…
We study quantum channels that vary on time in a deterministic way, that is, they change in an independent but not identical way from one to another use. We derive coding theorems for the classical entanglement assisted and unassisted capacities. We then specialize the theory to lossy bosonic quantum channels and show the existence of contrasting examples where capacities can or cannot be drawn from the limiting behavior of the lossy parameter.
