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Photon-monitoring attack on continuous-variable quantum key distribution with source in middle

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Abstract

Motivated by a fact that the non-Gaussian operation may increase entanglement of an entangled system, we suggest a photon-monitoring attack strategy in the entanglement-based (EB) continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CVQKD) using the photon subtraction operations, where the entangled source originates from the center instead of one of the legal participants. It shows that an eavesdropper, Eve, can steal large information from participants after intercepting the partial beams with the photon-monitoring attach strategy. The structure of the proposed CVQKD protocol is useful in simply analyzing how quantum loss in imperfect channels can decrease the performance of the CVQKD protocol. The proposed attack strategy can be implemented under current technology, where a newly developed and versatile no-Gaussian operation can be well employed with the entangled source in middle in order to access to mass information in the EB CVQKD protocol, as well as in the prepare-and-measure (PM) CVQKD protocol.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61272495, 61379153), the postdoctoral science foundation of China (2013M542119), and partly by Scientific Research Fund of Hunan Provincial Education Department (13A010) and the construct program of the key discipline in Hunan province.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, China

    Yijun Wang, Peng Huang & Ying Guo

  2. School of Engineering and Information Technology, University of New South Wales at Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, ACT, 2610, Australia

    Ying Guo

  3. School of Physics and Information Science, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, 410081, China

    Ying Guo

  4. Department of Information Management, Hunan University of Finance and Economics, Changsha, 410205, China

    Dazu Huang

Authors
  1. Yijun Wang
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  2. Peng Huang
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  3. Ying Guo
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  4. Dazu Huang
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Correspondence to Dazu Huang.

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Wang, Y., Huang, P., Guo, Y. et al. Photon-monitoring attack on continuous-variable quantum key distribution with source in middle. Quantum Inf Process 13, 2745–2757 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-014-0821-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-014-0821-z

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