Device-independent quantum key distribution with random key basis.

Device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD) is the art of using untrusted devices to distribute secret keys in an insecure network. It thus represents the ultimate form of cryptography, offering not only information-theoretic security against channel attacks, but also against attacks exploiting implementation loopholes. In recent years, much progress has been made towards realising the first DIQKD experiments, but current proposals are just out of reach of today's loophole-free Bell experiments. Here, we significantly narrow the gap between the theory and practice of DIQKD with a simple variant of the original protocol based on the celebrated Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) Bell inequality. By using two randomly chosen key generating bases instead of one, we show that our protocol significantly improves over the original DIQKD protocol, enabling positive keys in the high noise regime for the first time. We also compute the finite-key security of the protocol for general attacks, showing that approximately 108-1010 measurement rounds are needed to achieve positive rates using state-of-the-art experimental parameters. Our proposed DIQKD protocol thus represents a highly promising path towards the first realisation of DIQKD in practice.

All pure bipartite entangled states can be self-tested.

Quantum technologies promise advantages over their classical counterparts in the fields of computation, security and sensing. It is thus desirable that classical users are able to obtain guarantees on quantum devices, even without any knowledge of their inner workings. That such classical certification is possible at all is remarkable: it is a consequence of the violation of Bell inequalities by entangled quantum systems. Device-independent self-testing refers to the most complete such certification: it enables a classical user to uniquely identify the quantum state shared by uncharacterized devices by simply inspecting the correlations of measurement outcomes. Self-testing was first demonstrated for the singlet state and a few other examples of self-testable states were reported in recent years. Here, we address the long-standing open question of whether every pure bipartite entangled state is self-testable. We answer it affirmatively by providing explicit self-testing correlations for all such states.