Further Improving the Decoy State Quantum Key Distribution Protocol with Advantage Distillation
Abstract
In this paper, we revisit the application of classical advantage distillation (CAD) to the decoy-state BB84 protocol. Prior work has shown that CAD can greatly improve maximal distances and noise tolerances of the practical decoy state protocol. However, past work in deriving key-rate bounds for this protocol with CAD have assumed a trivial bound on the quantum entropy, whenever Alice sends a vacuum state in a CAD block (i.e., the entropy of such blocks is taken to be zero). Since such rounds contribute, negatively, to the error correction leakage, this results in a correct, though sub-optimal bound. Here, we derive a new proof of security for CAD applied to the decoy state BB84 protocol, computing a bound on Eve's uncertainty in all possible single and vacuum photon events. We use this to derive a new asymptotic key-rate bound which, we show, outperforms prior work, allowing for increased distances and noise tolerances.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.02565,
title = {Further Improving the Decoy State Quantum Key Distribution Protocol with Advantage Distillation},
author = {Walter O. Krawec},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.02565},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
There is a mistake in my proof on page 12; many thanks to Davide Orsucci for his comments!