Exercise 3.15 Discussion

$\def\i{\mathbf {i}}\def\ket#1{|{#1}\rangle}\def\bra#1{\langle{#1}|}\def\braket#1#2{\langle{#1}|{#2}\rangle}\mathbf{Exercise\ 3.15}$

This exercise analyzes the effectiveness of some simple attacks an eavesdropper Eve could make on Ekert's entangled state based QKD protocol.

a) Say Eve can measure Bob's half of each of the EPR pairs before it reaches him. Say she always measures in the standard basis. Describe a method by which Alice and Bob can determine that there is only a $2^{-s}$ chance that this sort of interference by Eve has gone undetected. What happens if Eve instead measures each qubit randomly in either the standard basis of the Hadamard basis? What happens if she uniformly at random chooses a basis from all possible bases?
b) Say Eve can pose as the entity sending the purported EPR pairs. Say instead of sending EPR pairs she sends a random mixture of qubit pairs in the states $\ket{00}$, $\ket{11}$, $\ket{+}\ket{+}$, and $\ket{-}\ket{-}$. After Alice and Bob perform the protocol of Section 3.4, on how many bits on average do their purported shared secret keys agree? On average, how many of these bits does Eve know?

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