Modern cryptography provides the means to securely communicate data between authorized entities by using mathematical transformations which require pre-shared cryptographic keys. The need to share key material with authorized entities in a secure, cost efficient and timely manner has driven efforts to develop new key distribution methods. A promising method is Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) which is considered to be "unconditionally secure" because it relies upon the immutable laws of quantum physics rather than computational complexity as the basis for its security. An important component of any QKD system is the error reconciliation protocol which is used to identify and correct inconsistencies in the exchanged key material and to identify potential eavesdroppers. In this research, we provide an empirical analysis of the Cascade error reconciliation protocol to measure its efficacy under different error rates, sampling rates, error distributions and larger sifted key sizes. The key finding presented in this research is that an error sampling rate of 25% provides optimal Cascade performance when using variable block sizes.

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