5/8/2024

• Quantum Cryptography

8. Quantum cryptography [1/11]

• Computers are becoming ever faster and more powerful
• New opportunities for cryptographers and cryptanalysts alike.
• Encryption methods that were once thought to be secure can
become vulnerable because of faster processing speeds.
• For instance, currently much of our communications security
protocols rely on asymmetric key systems.

What if some day someone discovered a fast and simple

method for factoring large primes?!?

One possible solution is quantum cryptography

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8. Quantum cryptography [2/11]

• Quantum cryptography systems are designed for key
generation rather than for the direct encryption of data.
• They work by exploiting the quantum properties of photons.
• There are several methods available for quantum
cryptography, but here only one of these methods is briefly
described.
• A photon is the smallest possible measurement of light, and
can be characterised by its polarity of spin
• The polarity of a photon can be in any direction: north/south,
east/west, or any angle between
• The polarity of a photon cannot be measured because any
attempt to measure it can cause it to change its polarity. 3

8. Quantum cryptography [3/11]

So what is possible to do?
• It is possible to produce photons with a particular polarity by
passing a stream of them through a filter, known as a
polarising filter.
• The polarising filter can be thought of as a kind of slot.
• Every photon emerging from a slot (filter) will emerge with the
same orientation as the filter.
• If a photon with a north/south spin meets a slot
with north/south orientation it will pass
through.
• If a photon with a north/south spin meets a slot
with an east/west orientation it will be blocked.
• If the stream of photons meets a slot with a
south-west/north-east orientation, any photon
emerging will have the same orientation as the 4
slot.

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8. Quantum cryptography [4/11]

Spin: East/West
Orientation Angle: 0°

North-East/South-West
Orientation Angle: 45°
T. Kachur, Qbits and Crypto, retrieved from scienceinseconds
Website on 11/10/2013. URL:
http://www.scienceinseconds.com/blog/Qubits-and-Crypto

North/South
Orientation Angle: 90°

North-West/South-East 5
Orientation Angle: 135°

8. Quantum cryptography [4bis/11]

R. Colin Johnson, Hackers beware: quantum encryption is coming, retrieved from EEtimes 6
Website on 11/10/2013. URL: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1200212

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8. Quantum cryptography [5/11]

How does this help us to create an encryption key?
• Creating a shared key:
• Alice and Bob need two communication channels:
• A quantum channel: A channel that can transmit photons, such as a
fibre optic link
• Any other communication channel.
• Alice has four polarised filters to create streams of photons where
each stream has one of four different polarisations:
• Rectilinear polarisations (+): 0°, 90°;
• Diagonal polarisations (x): 45° and 135°. Polarisation/bit 1 0
• Alice and Bob agree that: Rectilinear (+)
• 0° or 135° will represent the binary state “0”. Diagonal (x) 7
• 90° or 45° will represent the binary state “1”.

8. Quantum cryptography [6/11]

• Creating a shared key:
• Alice generates the first stage of the key stream:
• Alice generates a stream of polarised photons, choosing at
random their polarisation.
• Alice transmits these photons one polarisation at a time along
the quantum channel
• Alice makes a note of the polarisations sequence that she have
randomly created
• Example: Bit Number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Alice’s choice of
scheme
+ x x x + + x +
Photons spin
from Alice 8
Alice’s random
key stream
1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1

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8. Quantum cryptography [7/11]

• Creating a shared key:
• Bob has no way of knowing what polarisation each of the
photons has!
• Bob has two detectors:
• A rectilinear filter (+)
• Photons with a rectilinear state passes through this filter unchanged.
• The rectilinear filter changes the state of a diagonaly polarised
photon to a random rectilinear state(0 °or 90°).
• A diagonal filter (x):
• Photons with a diagonal state passes through this filter unchanged.
• The diagonal filter changes the state of a rectilinearly polarised
photon to a random diagonal state (45 °or 135°).
• As each photon arrives, Bob directs it, at random, to one of his
two detectors 9

8. Quantum cryptography [8/11]

• Creating a shared key:
• Alice and Bob communicate over the standard communication channel
to discuss Bob’s choice of detectors
• They discard all the wrong bits that Bob obtained with an incorrect choice of
filter.
• The remaining bits are then used to derive a shared key stream.
• Example:
Bit Number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Alice’s choice of scheme + x x x + + x +
Photons spin from Alice
Alice’s random key
stream
1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1
Bob’s choice of scheme x x + + + + x x
Orientation of photons 10
measured by Bob
Bob’s received key
stream
1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0

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8. Quantum cryptography [9/11]

What happens if Eve had intercepted the stream of
photons?
• Eve uses the same technique used by Bob
• She will sometimes choose the correct detector and sometimes
an incorrect detector.
• If her choice is correct: the photon will continue on its journey with
its previous polarisation.
• If her choice is incorrect: she will alter the polarisation of the photon
that she passes to Bob.
• At the end of Bob’s detection, and after communicating with
Alice to discard wrongly detected photons, the resulting bit
stream will not be correct in every bit because of Eve’s
intervention! 11

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8. Quantum cryptography [10/11]

• Creating a shared key:
• Example:
Bit Number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Alice’s choice of scheme + x x x + + x +
Photons spin from Alice
Alice’s random key
stream
1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1
Eve’s choice of detector x x + x + x + +
Orientation of photons
from Eve
Bob’s choice of scheme x x + + + + x x
Orientation of photons 12
measured by Bob
Bob’s received key
stream
1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0

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8. Quantum cryptography [11/11]

• Creating a shared key:
• Alice and Bob perform a final check before they confidently
use the shared key stream:
• They publicly select and compare a number of bits chosen at
random from their key streams
• If they find a lot of mismatches, and the error rate exceeds an
agreed threshold, they discard the entire key stream and
generate a fresh one!
• Note that in practice, the generated key stream would be
much longer than the key stream used in our example.

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