Mastering the generation, propagation and detection of electro-magnetic waves has enabled
a technological breakthrough that has changed our entire society. World-wide communication through the telephone and the internet has become an integral part of our daily-life,
which is expected to grow even further with the emergence of the internet of things. While
secure communication was of concern mostly for governmental and financial institutions,
digital security has now caught the attention of the general public. The weaknesses of cur-
rent encryption protocols, such as the existence of back-doors or the predicted breakdown
of popular algorithms such as RSA, reveal the need for alternative encryption schemes
ensuring unconditional security on all types of devices.
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) has emerged as a powerful option to ensure a private
communication between two users. Based on the laws of quantum mechanics, this class of
protocols offers the possibility to detect the presence of a third party trying to intercept the
key during its distribution, and even to quantify the amount of leaked information. While
most research projects focus on long distance applications, little attention has been devoted
to short distance schemes such as wireless payment, network access and authentication,
which could highly benefit from QKD-enhanced security.
This thesis focuses on the development of a miniature QKD sender add-on that could
be embedded either in mobile devices or in existing optical communication platforms,
thus allowing for a secure key exchange with a shared dedicated receiver over a free-
space link. The proposed optics architecture (35 × 20 × 8 mm 3 ) is optimised for BB84-like
protocols and uses an array of four Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers with highly
similar properties to generate 40 ps long near-infrared faint coherent pulses at 100 MHz
repetition rate. Under strong modulation, the polarisation of the pulses is not well defined
and enables an external control of each diode’s emission by a wire-grid polariser. The
four beams are spatially overlapped in a polarisation-insensitive femtosecond laser written
waveguide array, and combined with a red beacon laser using an external beamsplitter to
ensure a stable, synchronised optical link with the receiver.
The complete module is compatible with current smartphone technology, allowing to
run the classical post-processing over WLAN in the future. First tests with a free-space
receiver indicate an average error ratio of 3.3 % and an asymptotic secure key rate of
54 kHz under static alignment. For the first time, a secure key exchange between a mobile
platform held by a user and a receiver equipped with a dynamic alignment system could
be demonstrated with an error ratio of 4.1 % and a secure key rate of 31 Hz. The further
optimisation of the experimental parameters and the implementation of a decoy protocol
will enhance the key generation rate as well as the general security of the system. The
results of this thesis pave the way towards unprecedented security in wireless optical
networks, as examplified for the communication between a mobile device and a dedicated
receiver.