Invisible Trojan-horse attack

Abstract

We demonstrate the experimental feasibility of a Trojan-horse attack that remains nearly invisible to the single-photon detectors employed in practical quantum key distribution (QKD) systems, such as Clavis2 from ID Quantique. We perform a detailed numerical comparison of the attack performance against Scarani-Acin-Ribordy-Gisin (SARG04) QKD protocol at 1924nm versus that at 1536nm. The attack strategy was proposed earlier but found to be unsuccessful at the latter wavelength, as reported in N.~Jain et al., New J. Phys. 16, 123030 (2014). However at 1924nm, we show experimentally that the noise response of the detectors to bright pulses is greatly reduced, and show by modeling that the same attack will succeed. The invisible nature of the attack poses a threat to the security of practical QKD if proper countermeasures are not adopted.

8 pages, 3 figures, due to problem in the compilation of bibliography, we are uploading a corrected version

References in corpus (5)

• Secure Quantum Key Distribution
• Trojan-horse attacks threaten the security of practical quantum cryptography
• After-gate attack on a quantum cryptosystem
• Risk analysis of Trojan-horse attacks on practical quantum key distribution systems
• Attacks exploiting deviation of mean photon number in quantum key distribution and coin tossing

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