Entanglement Swapping Enables the Practical Security of Quantum Cryptography

Entanglement is one of the most striking phenomena in quantum physics, playing important roles in fundamental physics and quantum information science. It enables a secure means of communication—quantum cryptography—and builds up the foundation of its unconditional security. Entanglement-based quantum cryptography has received great attention from the early demonstrations to the recent remarkable achievements. In a practical scenario, although entanglement-based quantum cryptography can provide inherent source-independent security, its detection side has been shown to be vulnerable to external probing attacks. Here we show that entanglement swapping can effectively solve this critical issue, enabling a side-channel-free quantum cryptography.Entanglement swapping allows each user’s quantum state preparation and detection in a completely private station, which is immune to any external probing side channels. We demonstrate the entanglement-swapping quantum cryptography scheme in the field based on two independent entanglement photon sources. Based on the remote entangled photon pairs, we implement the Ekert-1991 protocol under a channel attenuation equivalent to 100 km of standard optical fiber, achieving a Bell violation value of S=2.659±0.092 and a secret key rate of 0.0163 bit/s. While recent device-independent QKD demonstrations have reached 100 km using atoms or ions, our photonic ES-QKD offers a complementary, all-optical pathway that is directly compatible with existing fiber networks and quantum repeaters.