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Research Interests
Hoi-Kwong Lo's research interest is quantum information, particularly quantum cryptography. He was among the first to demonstrate the impossibility of a whole class of quantum cryptographic protocols including quantum bit commitment, thus correcting an erroneous long-held belief in the field. He and H. F. Chau provided a proof of security of quantum key distribution, thus solving a long-standing problem. Both results have been widely cited and also reported in the scientific press.
Besides the foundations of security, his current research focus includes the security of quantum cryptography with imperfect devices. He has a quantum cryptography lab for the study of implementation issues and systems building.
Quantum Cryptography Laboratory
Research on quantum cryptography laboratory of Prof. Hoi-Kwong Lo focuses on:
- Study of implementation issues of standard protocols in quantum cryptography,
- design and implementation of new quantum cryptographic protocols,
- study of eavesdropping attacks and defense strategies, and
- study of the effects of imperfections in real-life quantum cryptographic systems.
- Real-time high speed classical post-processing (i.e, advantage distillation, error correction and privacy amplification) of signals generated by quantum cryptography is a highly non-trivial subject. It involves a deep understanding of quantum coding theory and a detailed investigation of many implementation issues.
- Various new quantum cryptographic protocols have been proposed in the literature. It is interesting to implement them in experiments in order to gain a better appreciation of their strengths and weaknesses.
- In theory, quantum key distribution allows perfect security in communication guaranteed by the laws of physics. However, in our opinion, quantum information will lead to a new arms race between the quantum code-makers and quantum code-breakers. This is because a determined code-breaker will invest heavily in quantum technology to locate any implementation loophole in real-life quantum cryptographic systems. In our test-bed, we will launch such an arms race.
- In view of III), it is important to model imperfections in real-life quantum cryptographic systems and understand how they might affect the security and efficiency of those systems.
We have built up a state-of-the-art quantum cryptography test-bed to extend our theoretical research. The first set of optical fiber point-to-point, single photon-based quantum key distribution (QKD) system (from MagiQ) has already been set up. With the standard BB84 protocol, this QKD system can distribute symmetric keys between a sender and a receiver, using a two-way interferometer. Another similar fiber based system and free space QKD system will be set up shortly. In future, we are also interested in exploring other issues such as a) other quantum cryptographic protocols, b) the implementation of free-space quantum key distribution in future and c) other quantum information devices such as single-photon sources, single-photon detectors and quantum repeaters.
This research is financially supported by Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Ontario Innovation Trust (OIT), Premier’s Research Excellence Award (PREA), the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) Program and The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
