Resilience of gated avalanche photodiodes against bright illumination attacks in quantum cryptography

Abstract

Semiconductor avalanche photodiodes (APDs) are commonly used for single photon detection in quantum key distribution. Recently, many attacks using bright illumination have been proposed to manipulate gated InGaAs APDs. In order to devise effective counter-measures, careful analysis of these attacks must be carried out to distinguish between incorrect operation and genuine loopholes. Here, we show that correctly-operated, gated APDs are immune to continuous-wave illumination attacks, while monitoring the photocurrent for anomalously high values is a straightforward counter-measure against attacks using temporally tailored light.