Quantum key distribution and string oblivious transfer in noisy channels

Abstract

We prove the unconditional security of a quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol on a noisy channel against the most general attack allowed by quantum physics. We use the fact that in a previous paper we have reduced the proof of the unconditionally security of this QKD protocol to a proof that a corresponding Quantum String Oblivious Transfer (String-QOT) protocol would be unconditionally secure against Bob if implemented on top of an unconditionally secure bit commitment scheme. We prove a lemma that extends a security proof given by Yao for a (one bit) QOT protocol to this String-QOT protocol. This result and the reduction mentioned above implies the unconditional security of our QKD protocol despite our previous proof that unconditionally secure bit commitment schemes are impossible.