Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and Quantum Cryptography (QC)

This page came about because of how long it took PQC to get standardized. This was a slow enough process that a whole slew of QKD vendors arose and sold a lot of products promising this as a solution to dealing with quantum computers and harvest now decrypt later attacks. Many of those products did not do a great job at actually preventing listening in on their lines since QKD is an ongoing field of research where new issues are routinely being discovered.

All national agencies I'm aware of do not support QKD except in "very specific cases" and instead recommend Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC).

From the UK NCSC [1]:

> QKD does not provide authentication, nor do any other quantum techniques. Therefore, in practice, QKD must be combined with other cryptographic services to provide security against the threat from quantum computing, and therefore should not be relied on as a mechanism that provides substantial security value. [...] The NCSC will not support the use of QKD for government or military applications. PQC is the best mitigation to the threat to cryptography from quantum computers.

And the German BSI (and partners)[2]:

> Together with European partner agencies from France, the Netherlands and Sweden, the BSI has published a Position Paper on QKD. The paper concludes that QKD can only be used in niche use cases due to its technological limitations and that QKD is not yet sufficiently mature from a security perspective. Therefore, in light of the necessary migration to quantum-safe schemes, the clear priority should be the migration to post-quantum cryptography.

This is despite different choices for which PQC algorithms to use. E.g. NIST (and many others including the UK) have gone initially with ML-KEM for key exchange, while Germany/BSI have selected FrodoKEM and Classic McEliece.

[1] https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/paper/quantum-networking-technologie... [2] https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Themen/Unternehmen-und-Organisati...

The recommendation is to not use QKD. This is the correct recommendation. QKD solves key agreement if you have an authenticated line. But authentication is the harder more crucial problem.

Here's an interesting related aside: the likely design of a practical quantum internet would make QKD totally trivial. What a quantum internet would do is deliver kinda-noisy entangled Bell pairs to endpoints that wanted to communicate. The endpoints would then purify [1] this kinda-noisy entanglement into actually-good entanglement (e.g. from 1% error to 0.0000000000001% error). The purified Bell pairs can then be consumed in order to transmit qubits [2]. However, because of the monogamy of entanglement [3], the purification process must detect and correct eavesdropping (or else fail to produce output). So, once you have a sufficiently purified Bell pair, it can be measured to get a bit that can be used as a one time pad. (That said, this does still assume you have an authenticated channel! Purification requires communication, because without authentication you can be man-in-the-middle'd.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entanglement_distillation

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monogamy_of_entanglement

Basing modern cryptography on unsolved mathematics where one can say "this algorithm is resistant to quantum computers, but may still, though we BELIEVE unlikely, be vulnerable to a yet discovered classical algorithm" is dangerous.