Toward Efficient Quantum Key Distribution Reconciliation
This work addresses efficiency and security issues in quantum key distribution, which is crucial for secure communication, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing reconciliation techniques.
The paper tackles errors and information leakages in the BB84 Quantum Key Distribution protocol by proposing a reconciliation method using Turbo codes, which significantly improves protocol security and reduces Bit Error Rate compared to existing LDPC-based methods.
In this paper, we propose how to construct a reconciliation method for the BB84 Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocol. Theoretically, it is unconditionally secure because it is based on the quantum laws of physics, rather than the assumed computational complexity of mathematical problems. BB84 protocol performances can be reduced by various errors and information leakages such as limited intrinsic efficiency of the protocol, imperfect devices and eavesdropping. The proposed reconciliation method allowed to weed out these errors by using Turbo codes. Since their high error correction capability implies getting low errors, this method has high performance especially when compared to the last method presented in the literature based on Low- Density Parity Check codes (LDPC). In particular, we demonstrate that our method leads to a significant improvement of the protocol security and of the Bit Error Rate (BER) even with great eavesdropping capability.