High-speed and Large-scale Privacy Amplification Scheme for Quantum Key Distribution

Abstract

State-of-art quantum key distribution (QKD) systems are performed with several GHz pulse rates, meanwhile privacy amplification (PA) with large scale inputs has to be performed to generate the final secure keys with quantified security. In this paper, we propose a fast Fourier transform (FFT) enhanced high-speed and large-scale (HiLS) PA scheme on commercial CPU platform without increasing dedicated computational devices. The long input weak secure key is divided into many blocks and the random seed for constructing Toeplitz matrix is shuffled to multiple sub-sequences respectively, then PA procedures are parallel implemented for all sub-key blocks with correlated sub-sequences, afterwards, the outcomes are merged as the final secure key. When the input scale is 128 Mb, our proposed HiLS PA scheme reaches 71.16 Mbps, 54.08 Mbps and 39.15 Mbps with the compression ratio equals to 0.125, 0.25 and 0.375 respectively, resulting achievable secure key generation rates close to the asymptotic limit. HiLS PA scheme can be applied to 10 GHz QKD systems with even larger input scales and the evaluated throughput is around 32.49 Mbps with the compression ratio equals to 0.125 and the input scale of 1 Gb, which is ten times larger than the previous works for QKD systems. Furthermore, with the limited computational resources, the achieved throughput of HiLS PA scheme is 0.44 Mbps with the compression ratio equals to 0.125, when the input scale equals up to 128 Gb. In theory, the PA of the randomness extraction in quantum random number generation (QRNG) is same as the PA procedure in QKD, and our work can also be efficiently performed in high-speed QRNG.