Francesco Mazzoncini

We have shown how to conduct QKD vulnerability assessment in practice, based on a sound methodology inherited from Common Criteria. Taking a running CV-QKD system as a reference platform, we have experimentally tested and rated two different attack paths exploiting a common threat: detector saturation. Our results illustrate the importance of rating attacks in order to prioritize the implementation of countermeasures and to steer the design and engineering of practical QKD systems towards the highest possible security standards, paving the way to their security certification.

We introduce an explicit construction for a key distribution protocol in the Quantum Computational Timelock (QCT) security model, where one assumes that computationally secure encryption may only be broken after a time much longer than the coherence time of available quantum memories. Taking advantage of the QCT assumptions, we build a key distribution protocol called HM-QCT from the Hidden Matching problem for which there exists an exponential gap in one-way communication complexity between classical and quantum strategies.