Robust countermeasure against detector control attack in a practical quantum key distribution system: comment

Wu, Zhihao; Huang, Anqi; Qiang, Xiaogang; Ding, Jiangfang; Xu, Ping; Fu, Xiang; Wu, Junjie

doi:10.1364/optica.391325

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Crafty adversaries can instead send instantaneous bright trigger light, which blinds the detector without disrupting the monitor [35,36]. Other solutions [40][41][42][43], such as randomly changing the attenuation in front of the detector and analyzing the corresponding detection events and errors, also increase the difficulty of experimental operation [44]. While experimental solutions attempt to judge whether the generator is under attack by designing a more sophisticated system, further advanced attacks from Eve usually cannot be avoided [44,45].…”

Section: Qrngsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other solutions [40][41][42][43], such as randomly changing the attenuation in front of the detector and analyzing the corresponding detection events and errors, also increase the difficulty of experimental operation [44]. While experimental solutions attempt to judge whether the generator is under attack by designing a more sophisticated system, further advanced attacks from Eve usually cannot be avoided [44,45]. Therefore, it is vital to develop theoretical approaches that can fundamentally address detector blinding attacks.…”

Section: Qrngsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Source-independent quantum random number generator against tailored detector blinding attacks

Liu¹,

Lu²,

Fu³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Randomness, mainly in the form of random numbers, is the fundamental prerequisite for the security of many cryptographic tasks. Quantum randomness can be extracted even if adversaries are fully aware of the protocol and even control the randomness source. However, an adversary can further manipulate the randomness via detector blinding attacks, which are hacking attacks suffered by protocols with trusted detectors. Here, by treating no-click events as valid error events, we propose a quantum random number generation protocol that can simultaneously address source vulnerability and ferocious detector blinding attacks. The method can be extended to high-dimensional random number generation. We experimentally demonstrate the ability of our protocol to generate random numbers for two-dimensional measurement with a generation speed of 0.515 Mbps, which is two orders of magnitude higher than that of device-independent protocols that can address both issues of imperfect sources and imperfect detectors.

show abstract

Section: Qrngsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Qrngsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Source-independent quantum random number generator against tailored detector blinding attacks

Liu¹,

Lu²,

Fu³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Crafty adversaries can instead send instantaneous bright trigger light, which blinds the detector without disrupting the monitor [35,36]. Other solutions [40][41][42][43], such as randomly changing the attenuation in front of the detector and analysing the corresponding detection events and errors, also increase the difficulty of experimental operation [44]. While experimental solutions attempt to judge whether the generator is under attack by designing a more sophisticated system, further advanced attacks from Eve usually cannot be avoided [44,45].…”

Section: Source Independence Device Independencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other solutions [40][41][42][43], such as randomly changing the attenuation in front of the detector and analysing the corresponding detection events and errors, also increase the difficulty of experimental operation [44]. While experimental solutions attempt to judge whether the generator is under attack by designing a more sophisticated system, further advanced attacks from Eve usually cannot be avoided [44,45]. Therefore, it is vital to develop theoretical approaches that can fundamentally address detector blinding attacks.…”

Section: Source Independence Device Independencementioning

confidence: 99%

Source-independent quantum random number generator against detector blinding attacks

Liu

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Randomness, mainly in the form of random numbers, is the fundamental prerequisite for the security of many cryptographic tasks. Quantum randomness can be extracted even if adversaries are fully aware of the protocol and even control the randomness source. However, an adversary can further manipulate the randomness via detector blinding attacks, which are a hacking attack suffered by protocols with trusted detectors. Here, by treating no-click events as valid error events, we propose a quantum random number generation protocol that can simultaneously address source vulnerability and ferocious detector blinding attacks. The method can be extended to high-dimensional random number generation. We experimentally demonstrate the ability of our protocol to generate random numbers for two-dimensional measurement with a generation speed of 0.515 Mbps, which is two orders of magnitude higher than that of device-independent protocols that can address both issues of imperfect sources and imperfect detectors.

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“…This includes also observing the detector's count rates versus random variations of either the detection efficiency [52,53], or the attenuation in front of the detector [54]. These security patches could defeat the original attacks they were designed for, but unfortunately they fail against subsequent ad-hoc modified attacks [46,55].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Randomized ancillary qubit overcomes detector-control and intercept-resend hacking of quantum key distribution

Hegazy,

Obayya,

Saleh

2022

Preprint

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Practical implementations of quantum key distribution (QKD) have been shown to be subject to various detector side-channel attacks that compromise the promised unconditional security. Most notable is a general class of attacks adopting the use of faked-state photons as in the detector-control and, more broadly, the intercept-resend attacks. In this paper, we present a simple scheme to overcome such class of attacks: A legitimate user, Bob, uses a polarization randomizer at his gateway to distort an ancillary polarization of a phase-encoded photon in a bidirectional QKD configuration. Passing through the randomizer once on the way to his partner, Alice, and again in the opposite direction, the polarization qubit of the genuine photon is immune to randomization. However, the polarization state of a photon from an intruder, Eve, to Bob is randomized and hence directed to a detector in a different path, whereupon it triggers an alert. We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that, using commercial off-the-shelf detectors, it can be made impossible for Eve to avoid triggering the alert, no matter what faked-state of light she uses.For instance, the imperfect preparation of the single-photon state may lead to leaking information about the key. This gap between theory and real-life practice allows for a plethora of source-side attacks ranging from the photonnumber-splitting (PNS) attack [10,11], the phase-remapping attack [12,13], the wavelength-selected photon-numbersplitting attack [14], and the pattern-effect attack [15], to the nonrandom-phase attacks based on unambiguous-statediscrimination [16], and laser seed control [17,18,19].

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Robust countermeasure against detector control attack in a practical quantum key distribution system: comment

Cited by 7 publications

References 9 publications

Source-independent quantum random number generator against tailored detector blinding attacks

Source-independent quantum random number generator against tailored detector blinding attacks

Source-independent quantum random number generator against detector blinding attacks

Randomized ancillary qubit overcomes detector-control and intercept-resend hacking of quantum key distribution

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