Source-Aware Recovery and Security Bounds in Temporal-Mode Quantum Communication

Abstract

We analyze a temporal-mode extension of the two-way LM05 quantum communication primitive, in which a message block is encoded into a fixed-weight binary occupation vector (the support) alongside classical ordering information. We demonstrate that applying an independent-slot recovery model to this correlated source is fundamentally inconsistent. For an ideal erasure channel, we derive the exact maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) recovery probability, showing that source-aware decoding outperforms independent guessing by orders of magnitude. We extend this analysis to a realistic threshold-detector model, quantifying the degradation caused by dark counts and inefficiency. Furthermore, we clarify the quantum-classical information split: in the ideal single-photon limit, preparation averaging renders Eve's state independent of the support, yielding zero Holevo information. We establish conditional security bounds using entropic uncertainty relations and identify photon-number-splitting as the primary practical vulnerability. These results provide a rigorous source-aware recovery benchmark and define the physical conditions under which the quantum layer offers a key-consumption advantage over classical constant-weight coding.

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