We consider quantum key distribution implementations in which the receiver's apparatus is fixed and does not depend on his choice of basis at each qubit transmission. We show that, although theoretical quantum key distribution is proven secure, such implementations are totally insecure against a strong eavesdropper that has one-time (single) access to the receiver's equipment. The attack we present here, the "fixed-apparatus attack" causes a potential risk to the usefulness of several recent implementations.
@article{arxiv.1312.0979,
title = {Attacks on Fixed Apparatus Quantum Key Distribution Schemes},
author = {Michel Boyer and Ran Gelles and Tal Mor},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.0979},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
10 pages, 3 figure, 8 tables. A preliminary version of this manuscript appeared in TPNC '12: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Theory and Practice of Natural Computing, LNCS, Vol. 7505 (2012)