Practical architecture for mitigating random-phase attacks

Develop a practical MRR-aided UAV-based FSO/QKD architecture capable of coping with random-phase attacks beyond the assumption that the global optical phase of each retro-reflected pulse is random.

Background

The secret-key-rate analysis assumes that the global optical phase of every retro-reflected pulse is random. This assumption enables the performance-oriented treatment used in the decoy-state BB84 analysis, but a practical implementation must address attacks exploiting phase information. The paper identifies the design of an architecture that can cope with random-phase attacks as an unresolved direction for future work.

References

This study focuses on performance-oriented analysis, where the SKR is applied under the assumption that the global optical phase of each retro-reflected pulse is random. Practical architecture to cope with random phase attacks will be considered in the future work.

— Modulating Retroreflector-Aided UAV-Based FSO/QKD Systems  (2609.25928 - Luong et al., 22 Sep 2026) in Section III, subsection “Average Secret Key Rate (SKR),” footnote to the definition of the secret key rate