Abstract
The quantum digital signature protocol offers a replacement for most aspects of public-key digital signatures ubiquitous in today's digital world. A major advantage of a quantum-digital-signatures protocol is that it can have information-theoretic security, whereas public-key cryptography cannot. Here we demonstrate and characterize hardware to implement entanglement-based quantum digital signatures over our campus network. Over 25 hours, we collect measurements on our campus network, where we measure sufficiently low quantum bit error rates (<5% in most cases) which in principle enable quantum digital signatures at over 50 km as shown through rigorous simulation accompanied by a noise model developed specifically for our implementation. These results show quantum digital signatures can be successfully employed over deployed fiber. Moreover, our reported method provides great flexibility in the number of users, but with reduced entanglement rate per user. Finally, while the current implementation of our entanglement-based approach has a low signature rate, feasible upgrades would significantly increase the signature rate.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 7521-7539 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Optics Express |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 26 2024 |
Funding
Acknowledgments. We thank Benjamin Lawrie for sharing some lab space and several single-photon detectors for the deployed fiber measurements. Also, we thank Joseph Lukens for his design contributions to the white rabbit synchronization network and, alongside Brian Williams, to the development of the timetagger. This work was performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, operated by UT-Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC05-00OR22725. Funding was primarily provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Cybersecurity Energy Security and Emergency Response (CESER) through the Risk Management Tools and Technologies (RMT) Program. Funding for the prior development of certain Appendix C methods was provided by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research, under the Entanglement Management and Control in Transparent Optical Quantum Networks Research programs (Field Work Proposal ERKJ378).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Risk Management Tools and Technologies | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |
| Office of Science | |
| Advanced Scientific Computing Research | ERKJ378 |
| Oak Ridge National Laboratory | |
| UT-Battelle | |
| Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response |