Patent: quantum key distribution by detection loophole?

[gill1109]

About ten years ago, Luigi Accardi together with a Japanese friend Masanori Ohya and Luigi's highly skilled computer programmer Massimo Regoli were trying to market their detection loophole violation of Bell inequalities. They wanted to sell it commercially in order to do secure quantum key distribution and other quantum communication protocols without a quantum computer.

I just Googled to check up the names and the history - and it turns out they have filed a patent, two years ago!

https://patents.justia.com/inventor/massimo-regoli

Richard
PS it will be interesting to find out if they use the Pearle model. Years ago, Jan-Åke Larsson showed how such a cryptographic protocol can be broken by an inside agent using the Trojan Horse technique. Eve works as a software developer for their company and puts a trapdoor in the embedded software in the hardware which Accardi and Ohya sell to their fooled customers. Since Eve has total control of the pseudo-random number generators which are used in the "simulation" she knows in advance what the software is doing when the shared secret key is being generated