Attacks on fixed apparatus quantum key distribution schemes

Authors:
Michel Boyer;Ran Gelles;Tal Mor
Affiliations:
Département IRO, Université de Montréal (Québec), Canada;Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles;Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa, Israel
Venue:
TPNC'12 Proceedings of the First international conference on Theory and Practice of Natural Computing
Year:
2012

Citing 3
Cited 1

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On the security of interferometric quantum key distribution

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On the security of interferometric quantum key distribution

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Abstract

We consider quantum key distribution implementations in which the receiver's apparatus is fixed and does not depend on a choice of basis at each qubit transmission. We show that, although theoretical quantum key distribution (QKD) is proven secure, such implementations are totally insecure against a strong eavesdropper that has a one-time (single) access to the receiver's equipment. The attack we present here, the "fixed-apparatus attack" causes a potential risk to the usefulness of several recent QKD implementations.