Measurement-device-independent QKD with Modified Coherent State (1402.2502v1)

Abstract: The measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) protocol has been proposed for the purpose of removing the detector side channel attacks. Due to the multi-photon events of coherent states sources, real-life implementations of MDI-QKD protocol must employ decoy states to beat the photon-number-splitting attack. Decoy states for MDI-QKD based on the weak coherent states have been studied recently. In this paper, we propose to perform MDI-QKD protocol with modified coherent states (MCS) sources. We simulate the performance of MDI-QKD with the decoy states based on MCS sources. And our simulation indicates that both the secure-key rate and transmission distance can be improved evidently with MCS sources.The physics behind this improvement is that the probability of multi-photon events of the MCS is lower than that of weak coherent states while at the same time the probability of single-photon is higher.