J. Mauricio Lopez

Quantum detector attacks have been successfully implemented over commercial Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) systems. Those systems have exhibited some flaws as the secret key rate of corresponding protocols remains unaltered while the eavesdropper obtains the entire secret key. The ack-QKD protocol is a novel protocol that uses two quantum secret flows to distribute the key. One quantum flow is prepared with parallel states while the other uses non-orthogonal states. Parallel and non-orthogonal states are indistinguishable over quantum measurement and because they are randomly interleaved only Alice can verify the photonic gain of each quantum flow. The ack-QKD protocol resists a number of attacks such as the intercept-resend attack with faked states, the insertion attack without intercept-resend, the Photon Number Splitting attack and the Intercept-Resend with Unambiguous Discrimination attack. The ack-QKD protocol does not require additional hardware other than the BB84 protocol hardware and it can be implemented at the high level as a software application.