https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-024-05337-2
Regular Article
Simulation of an entanglement-based quantum key distribution protocol
1
Department of Physics “E. R. Caianiello”, University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II 132, 84014, Fisciano, SA, Italy
2
CNR - SPIN, c/o University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II 132, 84014, Fisciano, SA, Italy
3
INFN, Gruppo collegato di Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II 132, 84014, Fisciano, SA, Italy
Received:
3
January
2024
Accepted:
1
June
2024
Published online:
9
July
2024
Since the 80 s when it was first proposed, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) elicited great interest in the field of cryptography as a unique procedure for key generation that could in principle guarantee unconditionally secure communication “by the laws of Physics”. In the last fifteen years commercial solutions have started appearing on the market, showing that practical implementations of the protocol were not only possible but also competitive in terms of security and achievable secret-key rate. In this work we describe a simulation of the historical QKD protocol E91 on the IBM Quantum platform, making use of the qubit formalism to represent the quantum states received by two communicating nodes. Having implemented also the post-processing steps for the error correction and the privacy amplification, this model can represent a simple stand-alone tool to study the performance not only of one-to-one communication but of more complex systems that rely on QKD for security, one above all QKD networks.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-024-05337-2.
© The Author(s) 2024
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