Security analysis of KXB10 QKD protocol with higher-dimensional quantum states

Abstract

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is one of the exciting applications of quantum mechanics. It allows the sharing of secret keys between two communicating parties with unconditional security. A variety of QKD protocols have been proposed since the inception of the BB84 protocol. Among different implementation techniques of QKD protocols, there is a category which exploits higher dimensions qubit states to encode classical bits. In this paper, we focus on such a QKD protocol called KXB10, which uses three bases with higher dimensions. Analysis of the generalized dimension quantum states is performed by evaluating it based on the index transmission error rate ITER. We find that there is a direct relationship between qubit dimensions and ITER for the KXB10 protocol.