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Unconditionally secure key distillation from multi-photons

Kiyoshi Tamaki·Hoi-Kwong Lo
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Abstract

In this paper, we prove that the unconditionally secure key can be surprisingly extracted from {\it multi}-photon emission part in the photon polarization-based QKD. One example is shown by explicitly proving that one can indeed generate an unconditionally secure key from Alice's two-photon emission part in ``Quantum cryptography protocols robust against photon number splitting attacks for weak laser pulses implementations'' proposed by V. Scarani {\it et al.,} in Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 92}, 057901 (2004), which is called SARG04. This protocol uses the same four states as in BB84 and differs only in the classical post-processing protocol. It is, thus, interesting to see how the classical post-processing of quantum key distribution might qualitatively change its security. We also show that one can generate an unconditionally secure key from the single to the four-photon part in a generalized SARG04 that uses six states. Finally, we also compare the bit error rate threshold of these protocols with the one in BB84 and the original six-state protocol assuming a depolarizing channel.

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Kiyoshi Tamaki, Hoi-Kwong Lo. 2006-01-24. Unconditionally secure key distillation from multi-photons. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.73.010302

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