Related papers: Detector blinding attacks on counterfactual quantu…
A particularly successful detector blinding attack has been recently demonstrated on various quantum key distribution (QKD) systems, performing for the first time an undetectable and complete recovery of the key. In this paper two original…
In practical quantum key distribution systems, imperfect physical devices open security loopholes that challenge the core promise of this technology. Apart from various side channels, a vulnerability of single-photon detectors to blinding…
Security of an ideal system for quantum key distribution can be formally proved. However, technological imperfections of real systems can be misused by an eavesdropper to get information about the key without causing a detectable change in…
In the recent decade, it has been discovered that QKD systems are extremely vulnerable to side-channel attacks. In particular, by exploiting the internal working knowledge of practical detectors, it is possible to bring them to an operating…
Quantum key distribution (QKD) has been proved to be information-theoretically secure in theory. Unfortunately, the imperfect devices in practice compromise its security. Thus, to improve the security property of practical QKD systems, a…
In real-life implementations of quantum key distribution (QKD), the physical systems with unwanted imperfections would be exploited by an eavesdropper. Based on imperfections in the detectors, detector control attacks have been successfully…
Attacks that control single-photon detectors in quantum key distribution using tailored bright illumination are capable of eavesdropping the secret key. Here we report an automated testbench that checks the detector's vulnerabilities…
We propose a new quantum key distribution scheme that uses the blind polarization basis. In our scheme the sender and the receiver share key information by exchanging qubits with arbitrary polarization angles without basis reconciliation.…
Detector blinding attacks have been proposed in the last few years, and they could potentially threaten the security of QKD systems. Even though no complete QKD system has been hacked yet, it is nevertheless important to consider…
Counterfactual quantum key distribution provides natural advantage against the eavesdropping on the actual signal particles. It can prevent the photon-number-splitting attack when a weak coherent light source is used for the practical…
Continuous-variable quantum key distribution provides a theoretical unconditionally secure solution to distribute symmetric keys among users in a communication network. However, the practical devices used to implement these systems are…
We control using bright light an actively-quenched avalanche single-photon detector. Actively-quenched detectors are commonly used for quantum key distribution (QKD) in the visible and near-infrared range. This study shows that these…
A simple photon-number splitting attack is described which works on any lossy quantum key distribution system with a multi-photon source independently of the mean source photon number, and with no induced error rate. In particular, it…
Quantum cryptography promises security based on the laws of physics with proofs of security against attackers of unlimited computational power. However, deviations from the original assumptions allow quantum hackers to compromise the…
We propose an efficient strategy to attack a continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) system, that we call homodyne detector blinding. This attack strategy takes advantage of a generic vulnerability of homodyne receivers: a…
In this paper, we briefly show how the quantum key distribution with blind polarization bases [Kye et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 040501 (2005)] can be made secure against the invisible photon attack.
We present a method to control the detection events in quantum key distribution systems that use gated single-photon detectors. We employ bright pulses as faked states, timed to arrive at the avalanche photodiodes outside the activation…
We introduce the concept of a superlinear threshold detector, a detector that has a higher probability to detect multiple photons if it receives them simultaneously rather than at separate times. Highly superlinear threshold detectors in…
We study potential security vulnerabilities of a single-photon detector based on superconducting transition-edge sensor. In a simple experiment, we show that an adversary could fake a photon number result at a certain wavelength by sending…
We developed a countermeasure against blinding attacks on low-noise detectors with a background noise cancellation scheme in quantum key distribution (QKD) systems. Background noise cancellation includes self-differencing and balanced…