Correlation between different pulses is a nettlesome problem in quantum key distribution (QKD). All existing solutions for this problem need to characterize the strength of the correlation, which may reduce the security of QKD to an accurate characterization. In this article, we propose a new protocol immune to all correlations of all dimensions, with the only requirements of non-entangled and finite-ranged correlation, and bounded vacuum probability. Additionally, the new protocol is side-channel-secure and measurement-device-independent, giving high-level security in practical QKD systems. We provide the finite-key security analysis against coherent attacks and conduct numerical simulations to see the performance. The result shows that a small correlation range does not influence the performance a lot and the protocol could tolerate a large correlation range, such as correlations spanning over 500 pulses.
@article{arxiv.2507.11243,
title = {Finite-correlation-secure quantum key distribution},
author = {Yang-Guang Shan and Jia-Xuan Li and Zhen-Qiang Yin and Shuang Wang and Wei Chen and De-Yong He and Guang-Can Guo and Zheng-Fu Han},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.11243},
year = {2025}
}