Security Proof Against Collective Attacks for an Experimentally Feasible Semiquantum Key Distribution Protocol
This work provides a stronger security guarantee for the Mirror protocol, making it more viable for practical semiquantum key distribution implementations where noise is present.
The Mirror protocol, an experimentally feasible semiquantum key distribution (SQKD) protocol, was previously proven robust against noiseless attacks. This paper extends the security proof of the Mirror protocol to a wide class of quantum attacks, specifically "collective attacks," and evaluates the allowed noise threshold and the resulting key rate.
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.