Trojan Horse Attack Free Fault-Tolerant Quantum Key Distribution Protocols Using GHZ States

Recently, Yang and Hwang (Quantum Inf. Process. 13(3): 781–794, 19) proposed two fault-tolerant QKD protocols based on their proposed coding functions for resisting the collective noise, and their QKD protocols are free from Trojan horse attack without employing any specific detecting devices (e.g., photon number splitter (PNS) and wavelength filter). By using four-particle Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state and four-particle GHZ-like state in their proposed coding functions, Yang and Hwang’s QKD protocols can resist each kind of the collective noise–collective-dephasing noise, collective-rotation noise. However, their proposed coding function can be improved by the utilization of three-particle GHZ state (three-particle GHZ-like state) instead of four-particle GHZ state (four-particle GHZ-like state) that will eventually reduce the consumption of the qubits. As a result, this study proposed the improved version of Yang and Hwang’s coding functions to enhance the qubit efficiency of their schemes from 20 % to 22 %.