Quantum Cryptography on IBM QX

Abstract

Due to the importance of securing electronic transactions, many cryptographic protocols have been employed, that mainly depend on distributed keys between the intended parties. In classical computers, the security of these protocols depends on the mathematical complexity of the encoding functions and on the length of the key. However, the existing classical algorithms 100% breakable with enough computational power, which can be provided by quantum machines. Moving to quantum computation, the field of security shifts into a new area of cryptographic solutions which is now the field of quantum cryptography. The era of quantum computers is at its beginning. There are few practical implementations and evaluations of quantum protocols. Therefore, the paper defines a well-known quantum key distribution protocol which is BB84 then provides a practical implementation of it on IBM QX software. The practical implementations showed that there were differences between BB84 theoretical expected results and the practical implementation results. Due to this, the paper provides a statistical analysis of the experiments by comparing the standard deviation of the results. Using the BB84 protocol the existence of a third-party eavesdropper can be detected. Thus, calculations of the probability of detecting/not detecting a third-party eavesdropping have been provided. These values are again compared to the theoretical expectation. The calculations showed that with the greater number of qubits, the percentage of detecting eavesdropper will be higher.