Real-time monitoring of single-photon detectors against eavesdropping in quantum key distribution systems

Abstract

By employing real-time monitoring of single-photon avalanche photodiodes we demonstrate how two types of practical eavesdropping strategies, the after-gate and time-shift attacks, may be detected. Both attacks are identified with the detectors operating without any special modifications, making this proposal well suited for real-world applications. The monitoring system is based on accumulating statistics of the times between consecutive detection events, and extracting the afterpulse and overall efficiency of the detectors in real-time using mathematical models fit to the measured data. We are able to directly observe changes in the afterpulse probabilities generated from the after-gate and faint after-gate attacks, as well as different timing signatures in the time-shift attack. We also discuss the applicability of our scheme to other general blinding attacks.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Trojan-horse attacks threaten the security of practical quantum cryptography
• Measurement-device-independent quantum cryptography
• Random Variation of Detector Efficiency: A Countermeasure against Detector Blinding Attacks for Quantum Key Distribution
• Experimental asymmetric Plug-and-Play Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution
• Safeguarding Quantum Key Distribution through Detection Randomization
• Systematic afterpulsing-estimation algorithms for gated avalanche photodiodes