QKD is an innovative technology which exploits the laws of quantum mechanics to generate and distribute unconditionally secure cryptographic keys. While QKD offers the promise of unconditionally secure key distribution, real world systems are built from non-ideal components which necessitates the need to model and understand the impact these non-idealities have on system performance and securit...

In this work there are studied the conditions for the effective quantum communications between a terminal on Earth and the other onboard of an orbiter. The quantum key distribution between a LEO satellite and a ground station is studied in particular. The effect of the propagation over long distances as well as the background during day or night is modeled, compared and discussed in the context...

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We present a fibre-optical quantum key distribution system. It works at 1550 nm and is based on the plug&play set-up. We tested the stability under field conditions using aerial and terrestrial cables and performed a key exchange over 67 km between Geneva and Lausanne.

Due to the resource constraints on sensor networks, many recent key management schemes exploit the location of nodes in order to establish pairwise keys. Despite these efforts, location discovery for sensor networks is very difficult, because existing schemes have failed to consider changes in the signal range and the deployment error. As a result, network performance may accidentally decrease,...

The security of the previous quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols, which is guaranteed by the nature of physics law, is based on the legitimate users. However, impersonation of the legitimate communicators by eavesdroppers, in practice, will be inevitable. In fact, the previous QKD protocols is un secure without authentication in practical communication. In this paper, we proposed an improv...

Controlling a large number of devices such as sensors and smart end points, is always a challenge where scalability and security are indispensable. This is even more important when it comes to periodic configuration updates to a large number of such devices belonging to one or more groups. One solution could be to take a group of devices as a unit of control and then manage them through a group...

Key predistribution is a popular technique for key distribution in sensor networks. The schemes available in current literature using this approach are for nodes with no or limited mobility. In this paper we present two key predistribution based scheme for heterogeneous networks i.e. networks which consist of nodes which are stationary as well as highly mobile. The existing schemes make use of ...

In this paper, we treat the entity authentication and subsequent key distribution problem in order to enhance multiple-entity (group of entities) communications with confidentiality and integrity services. We first give a summary of the existing methods to solve the key distribution problem. After this introduction of some known methods, we propose a different one, which detailed description wi...

Security of quantum key exchange depends on successfully detecting the presence of an eavesdropper. In most cases this is done by comparing the errors introduced by an eavesdropper with the channel error rate. In other words, the communicating parties must tolerate some errors without losing a significant amount of key information. In this paper, we characterize the effects of amplitude damping...