Walter O. Krawec

Walter O. Krawec, Rotem Liss, Tal Mor

Semiquantum key distribution (SQKD) allows two parties (Alice and Bob) to create a shared secret key, even if one of these parties (say, Alice) is classical. However, most SQKD protocols suffer from severe practical security problems when implemented using photons. The recently developed "Mirror protocol" [Boyer, Katz, Liss, and Mor, Phys. Rev. A 96, 062335 (2017)] is an experimentally feasible SQKD protocol overcoming those drawbacks. The Mirror protocol was proven robust (namely, it was proven secure against a limited class of attacks including all noiseless attacks), but its security in case some noise is allowed (natural or due to eavesdropping) has not been proved yet. Here we prove security of the Mirror protocol against a wide class of quantum attacks (the "collective attacks"), and we evaluate the allowed noise threshold and the resulting key rate.

Omar Amer, Walter O. Krawec

In this paper we derive a key rate expression for the extended version of the B92 quantum key distribution protocol that takes into account, for the first time, the effects of operating with finite resources. With this expression, we conduct an analysis of the protocol in a variety of different noise and key-length settings, and compare to previous bounds on comparable protocols.

Zefan Tang, Yanyuan Qin, Zimin Jiang et al.

Existing microgrid communication relies on classical public key systems, which are vulnerable to attacks from quantum computers. This paper uses quantum key distribution (QKD) to solve these quantum-era microgrid challenges. Specifically, this paper makes the following novel contributions: 1) it offers a QKD-based microgrid communication architecture for microgrids; 2) it shows how to build a quantum-secure microgrid testbed in an RTDS environment; 3) it develops a key pool sharing (KPS) strategy to improve the cyberattack resilience of the QKD-based microgrid; and 4) it analyzes the impacts of critical QKD parameters with the testbed. Test results provide insightful resources for building a quantum-secure microgrid.