Experimental realization of BB84 protocol with different phase gates and SARG04 protocol

Abstract: Cryptography in the modern era is very important to prevent a cyber attack, as the world tends to be more and more digitalized. Classical cryptographic protocols mainly depend on the mathematical complicacy of encoding functions and the shared key, like RSA protocol in which security depends upon the fact that factoring a big number is a hard problem to the current computers. This means that high computing power can help you crack traditional encryption methods. Quantum machines claim to have this kind of power in many instances. Factorization of big numbers may be possible with Shor's algorithm with quantum machines in considerable time. Apart from this, the main problem is key sharing i.e., how to securely share the key the first time to validate the encryption. Here comes quantum key distribution. Two parties who are interested in communication with each other, create a process, which claims considerable security against an eavesdropper, by encoding and decoding information in quantum states to construct and share a secret key. Quantum key distribution may be done in a variety of ways. This paper begins with experimental verification of the BB84 procedure utilizing four bases (using phase gates) followed by the experimental realization of the SARG04 protocol which was derived from BB84 Protocol to overcome PNS attack. The possibility of a third-party attack and the effect of noise is considered and implemented. The IBM Quantum Experience platform was used for all of the implementations.