A comparative study of protocols for secure quantum communication under noisy environment: single-qubit-based protocols versus entangled-state-based protocols

The effect of noise on various protocols of secure quantum communication has been studied. Specifically, we have investigated the effect of amplitude damping, phase damping, squeezed generalized amplitude damping, Pauli type as well as various collective noise models on the protocols of quantum key distribution, quantum key agreement,quantum secure direct quantum communication and quantum dialogue. From each type of protocol of secure quantum communication, we have chosen two protocols for our comparative study; one based on single qubit states and the other one on entangled states. The comparative study reported here has revealed that single-qubit-based schemes are generally found to perform better in the presence of amplitude damping, phase damping, squeezed generalized amplitude damping noises, while entanglement-based protocols turn out to be preferable in the presence of collective noises. It is also observed that the effect of noise entirely depends upon the number of rounds of quantum communication involved in a scheme of quantum communication. Further, it is observed that squeezing, a completely quantum mechanical resource present in the squeezed generalized amplitude channel, can be used in a beneficial way as it may yield higher fidelity compared to the corresponding zero squeezing case.Comment: 23 pages 7 figure

Trusted Noise in Continuous-Variable Quantum Key Distribution: a Threat and a Defense

We address the role of the phase-insensitive trusted preparation and detection noise in the security of a continuous-variable quantum key distribution, considering the Gaussian protocols on the basis of coherent and squeezed states and studying them in the conditions of Gaussian lossy and noisy channels. The influence of such a noise on the security of Gaussian quantum cryptography can be crucial, even despite the fact that a noise is trusted, due to a strongly nonlinear behavior of the quantum entropies involved in the security analysis. We recapitulate the known effect of the preparation noise in both direct and reverse-reconciliation protocols, as well as the detection noise in the reverse-reconciliation scenario. As a new result, we show the negative role of the trusted detection noise in the direct-reconciliation scheme. We also describe the role of the trusted preparation or detection noise added at the reference side of the protocols in improving the robustness of the protocols to the channel noise, confirming the positive effect for the coherent-state reverse-reconciliation protocol. Finally, we address the combined effect of trusted noise added both in the source and the detector.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figure

Fundamental rate-loss tradeoff for optical quantum key distribution

Since 1984, various optical quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols have been proposed and examined. In all of them, the rate of secret key generation decays exponentially with distance. A natural and fundamental question is then whether there are yet-to-be discovered optical QKD protocols (without quantum repeaters) that could circumvent this rate-distance tradeoff. This paper provides a major step towards answering this question. We show that the secret-key-agreement capacity of a lossy and noisy optical channel assisted by unlimited two-way public classical communication is limited by an upper bound that is solely a function of the channel loss, regardless of how much optical power the protocol may use. Our result has major implications for understanding the secret-key-agreement capacity of optical channels---a long-standing open problem in optical quantum information theory---and strongly suggests a real need for quantum repeaters to perform QKD at high rates over long distances.Comment: 9+4 pages, 3 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1310.012

Unidimensional continuous-variable quantum key distribution

We propose the continuous-variable quantum key distribution protocol based on the Gaussian modulation of a single quadrature of the coherent states of light, which is aimed to provide simplified implementation compared to the symmetrically modulated Gaussian coherent-state protocols. The protocol waives the necessity in phase quadrature modulation and the corresponding channel transmittance estimation. The security of the protocol against collective attacks in a generally phase-sensitive Gaussian channels is analyzed and is shown achievable upon certain conditions. Robustness of the protocol to channel imperfections is compared to that of the symmetrical coherent-state protocol. The simplified unidimensional protocol is shown possible at a reasonable quantitative cost in terms of key rate and of tolerable channel excess noise.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, close to the published versio

Quantum Conference

A notion of quantum conference is introduced in analogy with the usual notion of a conference that happens frequently in today's world. Quantum conference is defined as a multiparty secure communication task that allows each party to communicate their messages simultaneously to all other parties in a secure manner using quantum resources. Two efficient and secure protocols for quantum conference have been proposed. The security and efficiency of the proposed protocols have been analyzed critically. It is shown that the proposed protocols can be realized using a large number of entangled states and group of operators. Further, it is shown that the proposed schemes can be easily reduced to protocol for multiparty quantum key distribution and some earlier proposed schemes of quantum conference, where the notion of quantum conference was different.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

Asymmetric Quantum Dialogue in Noisy Environment

A notion of asymmetric quantum dialogue (AQD) is introduced. Conventional protocols of quantum dialogue are essentially symmetric as both the users (Alice and Bob) can encode the same amount of classical information. In contrast, the scheme for AQD introduced here provides different amount of communication powers to Alice and Bob. The proposed scheme, offers an architecture, where the entangled state and the encoding scheme to be shared between Alice and Bob depends on the amount of classical information they want to exchange with each other. The general structure for the AQD scheme has been obtained using a group theoretic structure of the operators introduced in (Shukla et al., Phys. Lett. A, 377 (2013) 518). The effect of different types of noises (e.g., amplitude damping and phase damping noise) on the proposed scheme is investigated, and it is shown that the proposed AQD is robust and uses optimized amount of quantum resources.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

Quantum e-commerce: A comparative study of possible protocols for online shopping and other tasks related to e-commerce

A set of quantum protocols for online shopping is proposed and analyzed to establish that it is possible to perform secure online shopping using different types of quantum resources. Specifically, a single photon based, a Bell state based and two 3-qubit entangled state based quantum online shopping schemes are proposed. The Bell state based scheme, being a completely orthogonal state based protocol, is fundamentally different from the earlier proposed schemes which were based on conjugate coding. One of the 3-qubit entangled state based scheme is build on the principle of entanglement swapping which enables us to accomplish the task without transmission of the message encoded qubits through the channel. Possible ways of generalizing the entangled state based schemes proposed here to the schemes which use multiqubit entangled states is also discussed. Further, all the proposed protocols are shown to be free from the limitations of the recently proposed protocol of Huang et al. (Quantum Inf. Process. 14, 2211-2225, 2015) which allows the buyer (Alice) to change her order at a later time (after initially placing the order and getting it authenticated by the controller). The proposed schemes are also compared with the existing schemes using qubit efficiency.Comment: It's shown that quantum e-commerce is not a difficult task, and it can be done in various way