Host Institute: University of Geneva

Project Supervisor: Prof. Hugo Zbinden

ESR: Davide Rusca

Starting date: April 2017

Duration: 3 years

Project Description

The security analysis of a QKD protocol is an important but difficult task, requiring a close collaboration between theorists and experimentalists. On the one hand, a thorough understanding of how different experimental parameters impact the secret key rate is mandatory to improve the performance. On the other, new simplified experimental setups need to be analyzed again. The ultimate goal is to design efficient and secure systems. This project investigates (a) the security of simple and practical QKD schemes (such as coherent one-way (COW)). The goal is to improve the security bounds obtained so far, or design new simple and efficient protocols in this framework; and (b) how to tame side channels in QKD, considering the vitality of quantum hacking in QKD. We are also trying to further extend results on device-independent or self-testing protocols for QKD and QRNGs to see how practical they can be.

Project Outcomes

To be updated.