Foiling zero-error attacks against coherent-one-way quantum key distribution

Abstract: To protect practical quantum key distribution (QKD) against photon-number-splitting attacks, one could measure the coherence of the received signals. One prominent example that follows this approach is coherent-one-way (COW) QKD, which is commercially available. Surprisingly, however, it has been shown very recently that its secret key rate scales quadratically with the channel transmittance, and, thus, this scheme is unsuitable for long-distance transmission. This result was derived by using a zero-error attack, which prevents the distribution of a secure key without introducing any error. Here, we study various countermeasures to foil zero-error attacks against COW-QKD. They require to either monitor some additional available detection statistics, or to increase the number of quantum states emitted. We obtain asymptotic upper security bounds on the secret key rate that scale close to linear with the channel transmittance, thus suggesting the effectiveness of the countermeasures to boost the performance of this protocol.