Due to its ability to tolerate high channel loss, decoy-state quantum key distribution (QKD) has been one of the main focuses within the QKD community. Notably, several experimental groups have demonstrated that it is secure and feasible under real-world conditions. Crucially, however, the security and feasibility claims made by most of these experiments were obtained under the assumption that the eavesdropper is restricted to particular types of attacks or that the finite-key effects are neglected. Unfortunately, such assumptions are not possible to guarantee in practice. In this work, we provide concise and tight finite-key security bounds for practical decoy-state QKD that are valid against general attacks.

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We present a fully automated quantum key distribution prototype running at 625 MHz clock rate. Taking advantage of ultra low loss (ULL) fibres and low-noise superconducting detectors, we can distribute 6,000 secret bits per second over 100 km and 15 bits per second over 250km.

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In this paper, we report on the performance of the SwissQuantum quantum key distribution (QKD) network. The network was installed in the Geneva metropolitan area and run for more than one and a half years, from the end of March 2009 to the beginning of January 2011. The main goal of this experiment was to test the reliability of the quantum layer over a long period of time in a production environment. A key management layer has been developed to manage the key between the three nodes of the network. This QKD-secure network was used by end-users through an application layer.PACS numbers: 03.67.Dd, 03.67.Hk, ‡ D Stucki and M Legré contributed equivalently to the writing of this paper.