Encheng Tian

Privacy amplification is a critical component in quantum key distribution (QKD) to eliminate eavesdropper information and distill unconditional secure keys. In this paper, a privacy amplification algorithm using two-dimensional cellular automata (2D CA) for quantum key distribution (QKD) is presented. The proposed algorithm decreases the computation complexity and increases the processing speed. Unlike conventional Toeplitz hash algorithms, the proposed algorithm utilizes the inherent parallelism of 2D CA to enable simultaneous multi-bit confusion through cyclic row shifts and XOR operations. And we prove that the 2D CA-based algorithm is a universal hash family and satisfies the principle of privacy amplification. The results of NIST randomness test and avalanche test show that the proposed algorithm has great randomness performance. Finally, we implement the proposed algorithm in field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The experimental results on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA demonstrate that our scheme achieves high throughput and significantly reduces hardware resource consumption.