Loss-tolerant quantum cryptography with imperfect sources

Abstract

© 2014 American Physical Society. In principle, quantum key distribution (QKD) offers unconditional security based on the laws of physics. Unfortunately, all previous QKD experiments assume perfect state preparation in their security analysis. Therefore, the generated key is not proven to be secure in the presence of unavoidable modulation errors. The key reason that modulation errors are not considered in previous QKD experiments lies in a crucial weakness of the standard Gottesman-Lo-Lütkenhaus-Preskill (GLLP) model, namely, it is not loss tolerant and Eve may in principle enhance imperfections through losses. Here, we propose a QKD protocol that is loss tolerant to state preparation flaws. Importantly, we show conclusively that the state preparation process in QKD can be much less precise than initially thought. Our method can also be applied to other quantum cryptographic protocols.