Quantum-Space Attacks

Theoretical quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols commonly rely on the use of qubits (quantum bits). In reality, however, due to practical limitations, the legitimate users are forced to employ a larger quantum (Hilbert) space, say a quhexit (quantum six-dimensional) space, or even a much larger quantum Hilbert space. Various specific attacks exploit of these limitations. Although security can still be proved in some very special cases, a general framework that considers such realistic QKD protocols, as well as} attacks on such protocols, is still missing. We describe a general method of attacking realistic QKD protocols, which we call the `quantum-space attack'. The description is based on assessing the enlarged quantum space actually used by a protocol, the `quantum space of the protocol'. We demonstrate these new methods by classifying various (known) recent attacks against several QKD schemes, and by analyzing a novel attack on interferometry-based QKD.