Secure quantum communication with orthogonal states

Abstract

In majority of protocols of secure quantum communication (such as, BB84, B92, etc.), the unconditional security of the protocols are obtained by using conjugate coding (two or more mutually unbiased bases (MUBs)). Initially, all the conjugate-coding-based protocols of secure quantum communication were restricted to quantum key distribution (QKD), but later on they were extended to other cryptographic tasks (such as, secure direct quantum communication and quantum key agreement). In contrast to the conjugate-coding-based protocols, a few completely orthogonal-state-based protocols of unconditionally secure QKD (such as, Goldenberg–Vaidman and N09) were also proposed. However, till the recent past, orthogonal-state-based protocols were only a theoretical concept and were limited to QKD. Only recently, orthogonal-state-based protocols of QKD are experimentally realized and extended to cryptographic tasks beyond QKD. This paper aims to briefly review the orthogonal-state-based protocols of secure quantum communication that are recently introduced by our group and other researchers.