Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2019 ii Paper 2 10D c Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
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