Quantum key agreement with EPR pairs and single-particle measurements

In this paper, we present a QKA protocol with the block transmission of EPR pairs. There are several advantages in this protocol. First, this protocol can guarantee both the fairness and security of the shared key. Second, this protocol has a high qubit efficiency since there is no need to consume any quantum state except the ones used for establishing the shared key and detecting eavesdropping. In addition, this protocol uses EPR pairs as the quantum information carriers and further utilizes single-particle measurements as the main operations. Therefore, it is more feasible than the protocols that need to perform Bell measurements. Especially, we also introduce a method for sharing EPR pairs between two participants over collective-dephasing channel and collective-rotation channel, respectively. This method is meaningful since sharing EPR pairs between two participants is an important work in many quantum cryptographic protocols, especially in the protocols over non-ideal channels. By utilizing this method, the QKA protocols, which are based on EPR pairs, can be immune to these kinds of collective noise.