Device-independent quantum secure direct communication with single photon sources

Abstract

Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) can directly transmit secrete messages through quantum channel. Device-independent (DI) QSDC can guarantee the communication security relying only on the observation of the Bell inequality violation, but not on any detailed description or trust of the inner workings of users' devices. In the paper, we propose a DI-QSDC protocol with practical high-efficient single photon sources. The communication parties construct the entanglement channel from single photons by adopting the heralded architecture, which makes the message leakage rate independent of the photon transmission loss. The secure communication distance and the practical communication efficiency of the current DI-QSDC protocol are about 6 times and 600 times of those in the original DI-QSDC protocol. Combining with the entanglement purification, the parties can construct the nearly perfect entanglement channel and completely eliminate the message leakage. This DI-QSDC protocol may have important application in future quantum communication field.