Secret key rates for coherent attacks

Abstract: We develop a new method to quantify the secret key rate for permutation-invariant protocols for coherent attacks and finite resources. The method reduces the calculation of secret key rates for coherent attacks to the calculation for collective attacks by bounding the smooth min-entropy of permutation-invariant states via the smooth min-entropy of corresponding tensor-product states. The comparison of the results to the well-known post-selection technique for the BB84 and six-state protocol shows the high relevance of this method. Since our calculation of secret key rates for coherent attacks strongly depends on the way of treating collective attacks, a prospective progress in the analysis of collective attacks will immediately cause progress in our strategy.