Secure and Efficient Verification Protocol for Quantum Key Distribution

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a secure communication protocol that uses quantum bits (qubits) to ensure the security of key exchange between two entities (Alice and Bob). Their shared qubits may suffer from errors due to noise and eavesdropping in the quantum channels. After the QKD key agreement phase, Alice's key may not be different from Bob's key. Therefore, we need key verification to deal with the inconsistent qubits (i.e. the wrong qubits at receiver end). This key verification process is also known as information reconciliation. Recently, Kurt et al. proposed a reconciliation in QKD (RQKD) by using the polynomial consistency property. In this paper, we propose an enhanced RQKD (ERQKD) to improve key verification. Our method is still based on polynomial consistency, but uses the properties of consistency in a different way to obtain better key verification efficiency.