Tight asymptotic key rate for the BB84 protocol with local randomisation and device imprecisions

Abstract: Local randomisation is a preprocessing procedure in which one of the legitimate parties of a quantum key distribution (QKD) scheme adds noise to their version of the key and was found by Kraus et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 080501 (2005)] to improve the security of certain QKD protocols. In this article, the improvement yielded by local randomisation is derived for an imperfect implementation of the BB84 QKD protocol, in which the source emits four given but arbitrary pure states and the detector performs arbitrarily-aligned measurements. Specifically, this is achieved by modifying an approach to analysing the security of imperfect variants of the BB84 protocol against collective attacks, introduced in [Phys. Rev. A 88, 012331 (2013)], to include the additional preprocessing step. The previously known improvement to the threshold channel noise, from 11\% to 12.41\%, is recovered in the special case of an ideal BB84 implementation and becomes more pronounced in the case of a nonideal source. Finally, the bound derived for the asymptotic key rate, both with and without local randomisation, is shown to be tight with the particular source characterisation used. This is demonstrated by the explicit construction of a family of source states and optimal attacks for which the key-rate bound is attained with equality.