Full Security of Quantum Key Distribution From No-Signaling Constraints

2006/06/30 by Ll. Masanes, Lluís Masanes, Renato Renner +7
Computer Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Algorithm #Computer science #Computer security #Cryptographic primitive #Cryptographic protocol #Cryptography #Encryption #Independent and identically distributed random variables #Information-theoretic security #Key (lock) #Key distribution #Mathematics #Protocol (science) #Public-key cryptography #Quantum #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum cryptography #Quantum information #Quantum key distribution #Quantum mechanics #Random variable #Security analysis #State (computer science) #Statistics #Theoretical computer science #cs.CR #quant-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1109/tit.2014.2329417

published as IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume 60, Issue 8, pages 4973-4986, year 2014 · 15 pages, 2 figure

openalex publication_date 2014/06/30 · arxiv created 2014/09/24 · arxiv updated 2014/12/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We analyze a cryptographic protocol for generating a distributed secret key from correlations that violate a Bell inequality by a sufficient amount, and prove its security against eavesdroppers, constrained only by the assumption that any information accessible to them must be compatible with the non-signaling principle. The claim holds with respect to the state-of-the-art security definition used in cryptography, known as universally-composable security. The non-signaling assumption only refers to the statistics of measurement outcomes depending on the choices of measurements; hence security is independent of the internal workings of the devices - they do not even need to follow the laws of quantum theory. This is relevant for practice as a correct and complete modeling of realistic devices is generally impossible. The techniques developed are general and can be applied to other Bell inequality-based protocols. In particular, we provide a scheme for estimating Bell-inequality violations when the samples are not independent and identically distributed.

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