Information-theoretical Secure quantum key distribution Networks with a subset of malicious nodes

Note

Read for the A-0127 review, 2026-09-27. Three findings this catalogue had nowhere else. First, MDI-QKD and TF-QKD reduce the number of trusted relays but do not remove them, and security is still compromised when a relay assumed trusted starts misbehaving, which is why A-0127 leaves defeated_by_trust_models empty for a stated reason rather than by omission (clause 1). Second, the research gap is named: existing work on malicious relays addresses passive eavesdropping and not active attacks. Third, the limit of every path-diversity construction: a malicious node holding its own keys can spoof other nodes or disrupt the disjointness condition the bound rests on, and can use those keys for authentication to deceive other nodes. Its own construction is an information-theoretically secure distributed authentication scheme plus a fault-tolerant consensus scheme whose tolerance is a function of node connectivity and network size, deferred as a countermeasure row of its own for want of a second source.