Experimental quantum key distribution without monitoring signal disturbance

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a method of realizing private communication securely against an adversary with unlimited power. The QKD protocols proposed and demonstrated over the past 30 years relied on the monitoring of signal disturbance to set an upper limit to the amount of leaked information. Here, we report an experimental realization of the recently proposed round-robin differential-phase-shift protocol. We used a receiver set-up in which photons are randomly routed to one of four interferometers with different delays so that the phase difference is measured uniformly over all pair combinations among five pulses comprising the quantum signal. The amount of leak can be bounded from this randomness alone, and a secure key was extracted even when a finite communication time and the threshold nature of photon detectors were taken into account. This demonstrates the first QKD experiment without signal disturbance monitoring, thus opening up a new direction towards secure communication.