dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaPhoton-Number-Splitting versus Cloning Attacks in Practical Implementations of the Bennett-Brassard 1984 protocol for Quantum Cryptography
| Authors | Armand Niederberger, Valerio Scarani, Nicolas Gisin |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | quant-ph/0408122 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0408122 |
| DOI | 10.1103/PhysRevA.71.042316 |
| Journal | Phys. Rev. A 71, 042316 (2005) |
Abstract
In practical quantum cryptography, the source sometimes produces multi-photon pulses, thus enabling the eavesdropper Eve to perform the powerful photon-number-splitting (PNS) attack. Recently, it was shown by Curty and Lutkenhaus [Phys. Rev. A 69, 042321 (2004)] that the PNS attack is not always the optimal attack when two photons are present: if errors are present in the correlations Alice-Bob and if Eve cannot modify Bob's detection efficiency, Eve gains a larger amount of information using another attack based on a 2->3 cloning machine. In this work, we extend this analysis to all distances Alice-Bob. We identify a new incoherent 2->3 cloning attack which performs better than those described before. Using it, we confirm that, in the presence of errors, Eve's better strategy uses 2->3 cloning attacks instead of the PNS. However, this improvement is very small for the implementations of the Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) protocol. Thus, the existence of these new attacks is conceptually interesting but basically does not change the value of the security parameters of BB84. The main results are valid both for Poissonian and sub-Poissonian sources.
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"abstract": "In practical quantum cryptography, the source sometimes produces multi-photon\npulses, thus enabling the eavesdropper Eve to perform the powerful\nphoton-number-splitting (PNS) attack. Recently, it was shown by Curty and\nLutkenhaus [Phys. Rev. A 69, 042321 (2004)] that the PNS attack is not always\nthe optimal attack when two photons are present: if errors are present in the\ncorrelations Alice-Bob and if Eve cannot modify Bob\u0027s detection efficiency, Eve\ngains a larger amount of information using another attack based on a 2-\u003e3\ncloning machine. In this work, we extend this analysis to all distances\nAlice-Bob. We identify a new incoherent 2-\u003e3 cloning attack which performs\nbetter than those described before. Using it, we confirm that, in the presence\nof errors, Eve\u0027s better strategy uses 2-\u003e3 cloning attacks instead of the PNS.\nHowever, this improvement is very small for the implementations of the\nBennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) protocol. Thus, the existence of these new attacks\nis conceptually interesting but basically does not change the value of the\nsecurity parameters of BB84. The main results are valid both for Poissonian and\nsub-Poissonian sources.",
"arxiv_id": "quant-ph/0408122",
"authors": [
"Armand Niederberger",
"Valerio Scarani",
"Nicolas Gisin"
],
"categories": [
"quant-ph"
],
"doi": "10.1103/PhysRevA.71.042316",
"journal_ref": "Phys. Rev. A 71, 042316 (2005)",
"title": "Photon-Number-Splitting versus Cloning Attacks in Practical Implementations of the Bennett-Brassard 1984 protocol for Quantum Cryptography",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0408122"
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