Quantum Diffie–Hellman key exchange

The Diffie–Hellman key exchange plays a crucial role in conventional cryptography, as it allows two legitimate users to establish a common, usually ephemeral, secret key. Its security relies on the discrete-logarithm problem, which is considered to be a mathematical one-way function, while the final key is formed by random independent actions of the two users. In the present work we investigate the extension of Diffie–Hellman key exchange to the quantum setting, where the two legitimate users exchange independent random quantum states. The proposed protocol relies on the bijective mapping of integers onto a set of symmetric coherent states, and we investigate the regime of parameters for which the map behaves as a quantum one-way function. Its security is analyzed in the framework of minimum-error-discrimination and photon-number-splitting attacks, while its performance and the challenges in a possible realization are also discussed.