Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2019/ii/paper-2/10d/c/solution

Condition on a position retained after basis reconciliation, so Bob used Alice's basis. If Eve does not intercept, no error occurs. If she intercepts, her uniformly chosen basis agrees with Alice's with probability , again causing no error. With probability she uses the conjugate basis; her measurement and resent state then make Bob's bit uniformly random, giving an error with probability .
Therefore the bit error rate in the retained key is

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