Random Variation of Detector Efficiency: A Countermeasure against Detector Blinding Attacks for Quantum Key Distribution

Abstract

In the recent decade, it has been discovered that QKD systems are extremely vulnerable to side-channel attacks. In particular, by exploiting the internal working knowledge of practical detectors, it is possible to bring them to an operating region whereby only certain target detectors are sensitive to detections. Crucially, the adversary can use this loophole to learn everything about the secret key without introducing any error to the quantum channel. In this work, as a step towards overcoming detector blinding attacks, we focus on an experimentally convenient countermeasure, where the efficiency of the detectors is randomly varied.

Invited paper: 5 pages, 2 figures

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Robust countermeasure against detector control attack in practical quantum key distribution system
• Countermeasure against blinding attacks on low-noise detectors with background noise cancellation scheme
• Randomized ancillary qubit overcomes detector-control and intercept-resend hacking of quantum key distribution
• Efficient High-dimensional Quantum Key Distribution with Hybrid Encoding
• Quantum hacking perceiving for quantum key distribution using temporal ghost imaging
• A cost-effective measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution system for quantum networks