A general scheme for information interception in the ping-pong protocol (Q310429)

Summary: The existence of undetectable eavesdropping of dense coded information has been already demonstrated by Pavičić for the quantum direct communication based on the ping-pong paradigm. However, (a) the explicit scheme of the circuit is only given and no design rules are provided; (b) the existence of losses is implicitly assumed; (c) the attack has been formulated against qubit based protocol only and it is not clear whether it can be adapted to higher dimensional systems. These deficiencies are removed in the presented contribution. A new generic eavesdropping scheme built on a firm theoretical background is proposed. In contrast to the previous approach, it does not refer to the properties of the vacuum state, so it is fully consistent with the absence of losses assumption. Moreover, the scheme applies to the communication paradigm based on signal particles of any dimensionality. It is also shown that some well known attacks are special cases of the proposed scheme.