Techniques

The laser damage attack employs high-power laser pulses to compromise specific components within a quantum communication system. This type of attack can result in various outcomes, including the creation of backdoors for further quantum attacks like photon number splitting (PNS) or Trojan-horse attacks, degradation of system performance (e.g., reduced detector efficiency), or a Denial-of-Service (DoS) situation, such as completely blinding a detector.

The threat actor (Eve) manipulates the classical signal used for phase-reference alignment in CV-QKD systems, exploiting the trusted phase noise model to increase correlations with the secret key while masking her influence.