Thomas Herbst

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a fast growing scientific as well as commercial field. Governments as well as private businesses seek for enhanced security solutions that can withstand future hacking attacks on classical cryptographic protocols. Today, there exists a vast amount of different QKD protocols that claim to offer “unconditional” security. However, looking in more detail many subtleties lead to different security levels, or in worst-case scenarios to no security at all. Thus, it is of upmost importance to appropriately select and design QKD protocols and networks. In this work (presented as a poster), we present and compare three different QKD protocols, concerning their security, key-rate performance, and applicability especially for satellite-based QKD networks. Our main results from this study are presented and we introduce the key requirements and the basic workflow of the design and optimization of a trusted-node based and free European QKD network. Finally, realistic satellite missions and their expected secure key rates in various situations are presented.