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Abstract

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a prominent solution to achieve proven secure data transmission between legitimate users despite any assumptions about the eavesdropper's computational power (given that the laws of quantum mechanics are correct). This remains true even under attacks by quantum computers. In recent years, there has been a great research interest in developing enhanced security constructions based on QKD. This is mainly driven by the envisioned threats of quantum computers to the traditional information security infrastructure based on public key cryptography. This research lies under the wide umbrella of the so-called post-quantum cryptography. However, for any QKD protocol, an accurate estimation of the Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBER) before the information reconciliation phase is crucial for both the efficiency and security perspectives. In spite of the importance of the QBER estimation step, the state-of-the-art literature still lacks a detailed investigation of the practical aspects of this issue. Therefore, this work aims to fill this research gap. An extension of the EnQuad simulator has been used to study the effect of QBER estimation on the efficiency and security of the BB84 QKD protocol for depolarizing quantum channels and individual Intercept/Resend Eve attacks. Various parameters affecting the QBER estimation process have been carefully investigated. Our evaluation has shown the significant importance of the QBER estimation step. Indeed, an empirical formula has been derived for calculating the required size of the sifted key subset (the so-called sharing rate) needed for the QBER estimation. This is a major contribution of the presented work.

Keywords

Key reconciliation, QBER, QKD, quantum cryptography, unconditional security

Subject Area

Computer Science

Article Type

Article

First Page

2412

Last Page

2428

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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