High throughput error correction in information reconciliation for semiconductor superlattice secure key distribution

Abstract

Semiconductor superlattice secure key distribution (SSL-SKD) has been experimentally demonstrated to be a novel scheme to generate and agree on the identical key in unconditional security just by public channel. The error correction in the information reconciliation procedure is introduced to eliminate the inevitable differences of analog systems in SSL-SKD. Nevertheless, the error correction has been proved to be the performance bottleneck of information reconciliation for high computational complexity. Hence, it determines the final secure key throughput of SSL-SKD. In this paper, different frequently-used error correction codes, including BCH codes, LDPC codes, and Polar codes, are optimized separately to raise the performance, making them usable in practice. Firstly, we perform multi-threading to support multi-codeword decoding for BCH codes and Polar codes and updated value calculation for LDPC codes. Additionally, we construct lookup tables to reduce redundant calculations, such as logarithmic table and antilogarithmic table for finite field computation. Our experimental results reveal that our proposed optimization methods can significantly promote the efficiency of SSL-SKD, and three error correction codes can reach the throughput of Mbps and provide a minimum secure key rate of 99%.