Quantum secret-sharing protocols involving N partners (NQSS) are key distribution protocols in which Alice encodes her key into $N-1$ qubits, in such a way that all the other partners must cooperate in order to retrieve the key. On these protocols, several eavesdropping scenarios are possible: some partners may want to reconstruct the key without the help of the other ones, and consequently collaborate with an Eve that eavesdrops on the other partners' channels. For each of these scenarios, we give the optimal individual attack that the Eve can perform. In case of such an optimal attack, the authorized partners have a higher information on the key than the unauthorized ones if and only if they can violate a Bell's inequality.
We analyze various eavesdropping strategies on a quantum cryptographic channel. We present the optimal strategy for an eavesdropper restricted to a two-dimensional probe, interacting on-line with each transmitted signal. The link between safety of the transmission and the violation of Bell's inequality is discussed. We also use a quantum copying machine for eavesdropping and for broadcasting quantum information.
Intermediate states are known from intercept/resend eavesdropping in the BB84 quantum cryptographic protocol. But they also play fundamental roles in the optimal eavesdropping strategy on BB84 and in the CHSH inequality. We generalize the intermediate states to arbitrary dimension and consider intercept/resend eavesdropping, optimal eavesdropping on the generalized BB84 protocol and present a generalized CHSH inequality for two entangled quNits based on these states.
We consider a family of quantum communication protocols involving $N$ partners. We demonstrate the existence of a link between the security of these protocols against individual attacks by the eavesdropper, and the violation of some Bell's inequalities, generalizing the link that was noticed some years ago for two-partners quantum cryptography. The arguments are independent of the local hidden variable debate.
A generalization of the quantum cryptographic protocol by Bennett and Brassard is discussed, using three conjugate bases, i.e. six states. By calculating the optimal mutual information between sender and eavesdropper it is shown that this scheme is safer against eavesdropping on single qubits than the one based on two conjugate bases. We also address the question for a connection between the maximal classical correlation in a generalized Bell inequality and the intersection of mutual informations between sender/receiver and sender/eavesdropper.
A degree of violation of the Bell inequality depends on momenta of massive particles with respect to a laboratory if spin plays a role af a "yes--no" observable. For ultra-relativistic particles the standard Ekert test has to take into accont this velocity dependent suppression of the degree of violation of the inequality. Otherwise Alice and Bob may "discover" a nonexisting eavesdropper.
Using polarization-entangled photons from spontaneous parametric downconversion, we have implemented Ekert's quantum cryptography protocol. The near-perfect correlations of the photons allow the sharing of a secret key between two parties. The presence of an eavesdropper is continually checked by measuring Bell's inequalities. We investigated several possible eavesdropper strategies, including pseudo-quantum non-demolition measurements. In all cases, the eavesdropper's presence was readily apparent. We discuss a procedure to increase her detectability.
We review the status of Bell's inequalities in quantum information, stressing mainly the links with quantum key distribution and distillation of entanglement. We also prove that for all the eavesdropping attacks using one qubit, and for a family of attacks of two qubits, acting on half of a maximally entangled state of two qubits, the violation of a Bell inequality implies the possibility of an efficient secret-key extraction.
We consider the Bennett-Brassard cryptographic scheme, which uses two conjugate quantum bases. An eavesdropper who attempts to obtain information on qubits sent in one of the bases causes a disturbance to qubits sent in the other basis. We derive an upper bound to the accessible information in one basis, for a given error rate in the conjugate basis. Independently fixing the error rate in the conjugate bases, we show that both bounds can be attained simultaneously by an optimal eavesdropping probe, consisting of two qubits. The qubits' interaction and their subsequent measurement are described…
Using the generalized Bell states and controlled not gates, we introduce an enatanglement-based quantum key distribution (QKD) of d-level states (qudits). In case of eavesdropping, Eve's information gain is zero and a quantum error rate of (d-1)/d is introduced in Bob's received qudits, so that for large d, comparison of only a tiny fraction of received qudits with the sent ones can detect the presence of Eve.
A time-reversal Bell test protocol is proposed. The quantum states are prepared by faraway separated partners and transferred to the third partner who carries out Bell basis measurement on them to post-select the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs. If some loopholes open, similar as that in normal Bell test, the Bell violation in the present protocol is apt to be interpreted with local hidden variable (lhv) theory. With some modifications on the protocol, the lhvs at both sides are prevented to exchange their information. Thus they only function locally and cannot affect the behaviors of the …
A scheme is proposed by which two parties, Alice and Bob, can securely exchange real numbers. The scheme requires Alice and Bob to share entanglement and both to perform Bell-state measurements. With a qubit system two real numbers can each be sent by Alice and Bob, resulting in four real numbers shared by them. The number of real numbers that can be shared increases if higher-dimensional systems are utilized. The number of significant figures of each shared real number depends upon the number of Bell-state measurements that Alice and Bob perform. The security of the scheme against individual …
We present a generalized tomographic quantum key distribution protocol in which the two parties share a Bell diagonal mixed state of two qubits. We show that if an eavesdropper performs a coherent measurement on many quantum ancilla states simultaneously, classical methods of secure key distillation are less effective than quantum entanglement distillation protocols. We also show that certain Bell diagonal states are resistant to any attempt of incoherent eavesdropping.
A quantum key distribution and identification protocol is proposed, which is based on entanglement swapping. Through choosing particles by twos from the sequence and performing Bell measurements, two communicators can detect eavesdropping, identify each other and obtain the secure key according to the measurement results. Because the two particles measured together are selected out randomly, we need neither alternative measurements nor rotation of the Bell states. Furthermore, less Bell measurements are needed in our protocol than in the previous similar ones.
We propose a novel double-entanglement-based quantum cryptography protocol that is both efficient and deterministic. The proposal uses photon pairs with entanglement both in polarization and in time degrees of freedom; each measurement in which both of the two communicating parties register a photon can establish one and only one perfect correlation and thus deterministically create a key bit. Eavesdropping can be detected by violation of local realism. A variation of the protocol shows a higher security, similarly to the six-state protocol, under individual attacks. Our scheme allows a robust…
We propose a local scheme to enhance the security of quantum key distribution in Ekert protocol (E91). Our proposal is a fair sampling test meant to detect an eavesdropping attempt that would use a biased sample to mimic an apparent violation of Bell inequalities. The test is local and non disruptive: it can be unilaterally performed at any time by either Alice or Bob during the production of the key, and together with the Bell inequality test.
A quantum key distribution protocol based on entanglement swapping is proposed. Through choosing particles by twos from the sequence and performing Bell measurements, two communicators can detect eavesdropping and obtain the secure key. Because the two particles measured together are selected out randomly, we need neither alternative measurements nor rotations of the Bell states to obtain security.
We report two key distribution schemes achieved by swapping quantum entanglement. Using two Bell states, two bits of secret key can be shared between two distant parties that play symmetric and equal roles. We also address eavesdropping attacks against the schemes.
We present a quantum communication protocol which keeps all the properties of the ping-pong protocol [Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 187902 (2002)] but improves the capacity doubly as the ping-pong protocol. Alice and Bob can use the variable measurement basises in control mode to detect Eve's eavesdropping attack. In message mode, Alice can use one unitary operations to encode two bits information. Bob only needs to perform a Bell type measurement to decode Alice's information. A classical message authentification method can protect this protocol against the eavesdropping hiding in the quantum channel …
We derive monogamy relations (tradeoffs) between strengths of violations of Bell's inequalities from the non-signaling condition. Our result applies to general Bell inequalities with an arbitrary large number of partners, outcomes and measurement settings. The method is simple, efficient and does not require linear programming. The results are used to derive optimal fidelity for asymmetric cloning in nonsignaling theories.
We demonstrate an experiment on entanglement swapping using an optimal Bell-state measurement capable of identifying two of the four Bell-states for polarization entangled photons, which is the optimum with linear optical elements. The two final photons belong to separately created paris. They are entangled after their original partner photons have been subjected to the Bell state measurement, whose outcome determines the type of entanglement of the final photon pair. The resulting violation of Bell's inequality in both cases confirms the success of the teleportation protocol.
A multiparty quantum secret sharing (QSS) protocol is proposed by using swapping quantum entanglement of Bell states. The secret messages are imposed on Bell states by local unitary operations. The secret messages are split into several parts and each part is distributed to a party so that no action of a subset of all the parties but their entire cooperation is able to read out the secret messages. In addition, the dense coding is used in this protocol to achieve a high efficiency. The security of the present multiparty QSS against eavesdropping has been analyzed and confirmed even in a noisy …
We propose a theoretical scheme for secure quantum key distribution network following the ideas in quantum dense coding. In this scheme, the server of the network provides the service for preparing and measuring the Bell states, and the users encodes the states with local unitary operations. For preventing the server from eavesdropping, we design a decoy when the particle is transmitted between the users. It has high capacity as one particle carries two bits of information and its efficiency for qubits approaches 100%. Moreover, it is not necessary for the users to store the quantum states, wh…
We present bipartite Bell-type inequalities which allow the two partners to use some non-local resource. Such inequality can only be violated if the parties use a resource which is more non-local than the one permitted by the inequality. We introduce a family of N-inputs non-local machines, which are generalizations of the well-known PR-box. Then we construct Bell-type inequalities that cannot be violated by strategies that use one these new machines. Finally we discuss implications for the simulation of quantum states.
A quantum key distribution protocol is proposed that is a variation of BB84 that provides raw key generation from correlations that violate a Bell-type inequality for single qubit systems and not entangled pairs. Additionally, it 1) is state-independent, 2) involves two-way classical communication, and 3) does not require basis matching between the two parties. The Brukner-Taylor-Cheung-Vedral (BTCV) time-like form of the Bell-CHSH inequality [C. Brukner, S. Taylor, S. Cheung, V. Vedral arXiv:quant-ph/0402127] is employed as an eavesdropping check; sequential measurements lead to an inequality…
A large payload quantum steganography protocol based on cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) is presented in the paper, which effectively uses the evolution law of atom in cavity QED. The protocol builds up hidden channel to transmit secret messages using entanglement swapping between one GHZ state and one Bell state in cavity QED together with the Hadamard operation. The quantum steganography protocol is insensitive to cavity decay and thermal field. The capacity, imperceptibility and security against eavesdropping are analyzed in detail in the protocol. It turns out that the protocol not onl…
Device-independent quantum key distribution is a secure quantum cryptographic paradigm that allows two honest users to establish a secret key, while putting minimal trust in their devices. Most of the existing protocols have the following structure: first, a bipartite nonlocal quantum state is distributed between the honest users, who perform local measurements to establish nonlocal correlations. Then, they announce the implemented measurements and extract a secure key by post-processing their measurement outcomes. We show that no protocol of this form allows for establishing a secret key when…
"Nonlocality-of-a-single-photon" based Quantum Key Distribution and Random Number Generation schemes and their device-independent security analysis
University of Gdańsk（格但斯克大学）；Technology Innovation Institute（技术创新研究所）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）；Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院理论与应用数学研究所）
In this work, we present a quantum secret sharing scheme based on Bell state entanglement and sequential projection measurements. The protocol verifies the $n$ out of $n$ scheme and supports the aborting of the protocol in case all the parties do not divulge in their valid measurement outcomes. The operator-qubit pair forms an integral part of the scheme determining the classical secret to be shared. The protocol is robust enough to neutralize any eavesdropping on a particular qubit of the dealer. The experimental demonstration of the scheme is done on IBM-QE cloud platform with backends \text…
Pseudo-telepathy is the most recent form of rejection of locality. Many of its properties have already been discovered: for instance, the minimal entanglement, as well as the minimal cardinality of the output sets, have been characterized. This paper contains two main results. First, we prove that no bipartite pseudo-telepathy game exists, in which one of the partners receives only two questions; as a corollary, we show that the minimal "input cardinality", that is, the minimal number of questions required in a bipartite pseudo-telepathy game, is 3x3. Second, we study the Bell-type inequality …
A deterministic direct quantum communication protocol by using swapping quantum entanglement and local unitary operations is proposed in this paper. A set of ordered EPR pairs in one of the four Bell states is used. For each pair, each of the two legitimate users owns a photon of the entangled pair via quantum channel. The pairs are divided into two types of group, i.e., the checking groups and the encoding-decoding groups. In the checking groups, taking advantage of the swapping quantum entanglement and Alice's (the message sender's) public announcement, the eavesdropping can be detected prov…
We present a supervised secure entanglement sharing protocol via tripartite W states for faithful quantum teleportation. By guaranteeing a secure entanglement distribution in the charge of a third believed supervisor, quantum information of an unknown state of a 2-level particle can be faithfully teleported from the sender to the remote receiver via the Bell states distilled from the tripartite W states. We emphasize that reliable teleportation after our protocol between two communication parties depends on the agreement of the supervisor to cooperate via taking the W states as both the quantu…
Recently, in Sci. Rep. \textbf{6} (2016) 28767, Li et al., have proposed a scheme for quantum key distribution using Bell states. This comment provides a proof that the proposed scheme of Li et al., is insecure as it involves leakage of information. Further, it is also shown that all the error rates computed in the Li et al.'s paper are incorrect as the authors failed to recognize the fact that any eavesdropping effort will lead to entanglement swapping. Finally, it is established that Li et al.'s scheme can be viewed as an incrementally (but incorrectly)modified version of the existing scheme…
The promise of secure cryptographic quantum key distribution schemes is based on the use of quantum effects in the spin space. We point out that in fact in many current quantum cryptography protocols the space part of the wave function is neglected. However exactly the space part of the wave function describes the behaviour of particles in ordinary real three-dimensional space. As a result such schemes can be secure against eavesdropping attacks in the abstract spin space but could be insecure in the real three-dimensional space. We discuss an approach to the security of quantum key distributi…
In the cryptographic context, an earlier unexplored application of the temporal version of the Bell-type inequality is shown here in the device-independent (DI) scenario. This is done by using the Leggett-Garg inequality (LGI) to demonstrate the security against eavesdropping in a quantum key distribution (QKD) scheme. This typically involves a higher dimensional attack against which the standard BB84 protocol is insecure. For this purpose, we invoke an appropriate form of LGI. While the key generation is done by the usual Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) method, the security check against device …
In secret sharing protocols, a secret is to be distributed among several partners so that leaving out any number of them, the rest do not have the complete information. Strong multiqubit correlations in the state by which secret sharing is carried out, had been proposed as a criterion for security of such protocols against individual attacks by an eavesdropper. However we show that states with weak multiqubit correlations can also be used for secure secret sharing. That our state has weak multiqubit correlations, is shown from the perspective of violation of local realism, and also by showing …
The Ekert quantum key distribution protocol uses pairs of entangled qubits and performs checks based on a Bell inequality to detect eavesdropping. The 3DEB protocol uses instead pairs of entangled qutrits to achieve better noise resistance than the Ekert protocol. It performs checks based on a Bell inequality for qutrits named CHSH-3. In this paper, we present a new protocol, which also uses pairs of entangled qutrits, but achieves even better noise resistance than 3DEB. This gain of performance is obtained by using another inequality called here hCHSH-3. As the hCHSH3 inequality involve produ…
The Ekert quantum key distribution protocol uses pairs of entangled qubits and performs checks based on a Bell inequality to detect eavesdropping. The N-DEB protocol uses instead pairs of entangled qudits to achieve better noise resistance than the Ekert protocol. It performs checks based on the Bell CGLMP inequality for qudits. In this paper, we present the generalization for qudits of our protocol h3DEB (for qutrits). This protocol also uses pairs of entangled qudits, but achieves even better noise resistance than N-DEB and is showed to be secure against the same family of cloning attacks th…
We analyze a reversibility of optimal Gaussian $1\to 2$ quantum cloning of a coherent state using only local operations on the clones and classical communication between them and propose a feasible experimental test of this feature. Performing Bell-type homodyne measurement on one clone and anti-clone, an arbitrary unknown input state (not only a coherent state) can be restored in the other clone by applying appropriate local unitary displacement operation. We generalize this concept to a partial LOCC reversal of the cloning and we show that this procedure converts the symmetric cloner to an a…
In this Paper, we investigate the security of Zhang, Li and Guo quantum key distribution via quantum encryption protocol [$\text{Phys. Rev. A} \textbf{64}, 24302 (2001)$] and show that it is not secure against some of Eve's attacks and with the probability one half she gets all of keys without being detected by the two parties. The main defect in this protocol is that there is an attack strategy by which Eve can change the previously shared Bell state between Alice and Bob to two Bell states among herself and Alice and Bob. Hence, we show that with probability $1/d$ its generalization to $d$-d…
Long-distance quantum communication requires quantum repeaters to overcome photon loss in optical fibers. Here we demonstrate a repeater node with two memory atoms in an optical cavity. Both atoms are individually and repeatedly entangled with photons that are distributed until each communication partner has independently received one of them. An atomic Bell-state measurement followed by classical communication serves to establish a key. We demonstrate scaling advantage of the key rate, increase the effective attenuation length by a factor of two, and beat the error-rate threshold of 11\% for …
Nonlocality as a fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics is witnessed by violation of Bell inequality or its variants, for which all relevant studies assume some correlations exhibited by local realistic theories. The strategy of Bell's theorem is to establish some criteria to distinguish local realistic theories from quantum mechanics with respect to the nonlocal nature of entangled systems. Here we propose a model independent study of nonlocality that needs not to assume any local theory since observation of the expected nonlocal effect is straightforward quantum mechanically. Our proposal i…
We investigate direct observation of quantum nonlocality without reference to theoretical models (including Bell theorem) except quantum mechanics, with a bipartite polarization-entangled state in which one photon immediately reduces into a circular-polarization (CP) state after its partner is detected in another CP state. Of essence is the mechanical detection of the CP state of a photon that carries angular momentum and exerts a torque on a half-wave plate whose mechanical motion is then varied. If implemented, the model-independent observation of quantum nonlocality violates Lorentz invaria…
Standard quantum key distribution protocols are provably secure against eavesdropping attacks, if quantum theory is correct. It is theoretically interesting to know if we need to assume the validity of quantum theory to prove the security of quantum key distribution, or whether its security can be based on other physical principles. The question would also be of practical interest if quantum mechanics were ever to fail in some regime, because a scientifically and technologically advanced eavesdropper could perhaps use post-quantum physics to extract information from quantum communications with…
We consider the continuous-variable protocol of Pirandola et al. [Nature Photonics 9, 397-402 (2015), see also arXiv.1312.4104] where the secret-key is established by the measurement of an untrusted relay. In this network protocol, two authorized parties are connected to an untrusted relay by insecure quantum links. Secret correlations are generated by a continuous-variable Bell detection performed on incoming coherent states. In the present work we provide a detailed study of the symmetric configuration, where the relay is midway between the parties. We analyze symmetric eavesdropping strateg…
The purpose of this paper is to show the unusual behavior of a number of simple circuits under the effects of post-selection. A useful duality exists between post-selected ensembles and a consistent picture of acausal physics embodying the application of Novikov's consistency postulate to the wave-function of a time machine. A competing view applies this postulate to density matrices instead, but that lies outside the scope of this paper. To find out the result of a measurement on a particular circuit, we consider a weighted distribution of histories between some initial and final time, such t…
Quantum cryptography shows that one can guarantee the secrecy of correlation on the sole basis of the laws of physics, that is without limiting the computational power of the eavesdropper. The usual security proofs suppose that the authorized partners, Alice and Bob, have a perfect knowledge and control of their quantum systems and devices; for instance, they must be sure that the logical bits have been encoded in true qubits, and not in higher-dimensional systems. In this paper, we present an approach that circumvents this strong assumption. We define protocols, both for the case of bits and …
