Secrecy in Prepare-and-Measure Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt Tests with a Qubit Bound

The security of device-independent (DI) quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols relies on the violation of Bell inequalities. As such, their security can be established based on minimal assumptions about the devices, but their implementation necessarily requires the distribution of entangled states. In a setting with fully trusted devices, any entanglement-based protocol is essentially equivalent to a corresponding prepare-and-measure protocol. This correspondence, however, is not generally valid in the DI setting unless one makes extra assumptions about the devices. Here we prove that a known tight lower bound on the min entropy in terms of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt Bell correlator, which has featured in a number of entanglement-based DI QKD security proofs, also holds in a prepare-and-measure setting, subject only to the assumption that the source is limited to a two-dimensional Hilbert space.

Figure 1

Semi-device-independent scenario with the prepare-and-measure CHSH estimation. Alice’s source ($S_A$) can emit one of four different qubit states ${\rho }_{x,a}\in \{\rho ,{\rho }^{\prime },\sigma ,{\sigma }^{\prime }\}$ depending on a choice of input $(x,a)\in \{0,1{\}}^2$. Bob’s measurement device ($M_B$) performs one of two measurements depending on a choice of input $y\in \{0,1\}$, yielding an outcome $b\in \{0,1\}$.