Eavesdropping Attack with Hong-Ou-Mandel Interferometer and Random Basis Shuffling in Quantum Key Distribution

Abstract

We introduce new sophisticated attacks with a Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer against quantum key distribution (QKD) and propose a new QKD protocol grafted with random basis shuffling to block up those attacks. When the polarization basis is randomly and independently shuffled by sender and receiver, the new protocol can overcome the attacks even for not-so-weak coherent pulses. We estimate the number of photons to guarantee the security of the protocol.