A Taxonomy of Attacks on Quantum Key Distribution

Abstract

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a new way of sharing secret cryptographic keys with unconditional security by means of encoding of secret bits in quantum particles like photons. There are various potential security holes in the practical implementations of QKD, which may be exploited by the adversary to attack the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the scheme. This paper is an attempt to present various constraints, possible attacks and countermeasures on practical QKD systems. The paper classifies the already known attacks strategies and shows how these attacks may compromise the security QKD, while utilizing it as part of secure communication scheme in practice.