Secure communication with a publicly known key

Beige, Almut; Englert, Berthold-Georg; Kurtsiefer, Christian; Weinfurter, Harald

Secure communication with a publicly known key

Authors

Beige, Almut

Englert, Berthold-Georg

Kurtsiefer, Christian

Weinfurter, Harald

Description

We present a scheme for direct and confidential communication between Alice and Bob, where there is no need for establishing a shared secret key first, and where the key used by Alice even will become known publicly. The communication is based on the exchange of single photons and each and every photon transmits one bit of Alice's message without revealing any information to a potential eavesdropper.
14 pages including 2 figures, erratum added