Quantum Meets Statistical-Physical Secrecy: A Novel Hybrid Key Distribution Architecture

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 14 May 2026] Quantum Meets Statistical-Physical Secrecy: A Novel Hybrid Key Distribution Architecture Ertugrul Basar This letter proposes a novel hybrid key distribution architecture that jointly exploits quantum key distribution (QKD) and Kirchhoff-law-Johnson-noise (KLJN) statistical-physical key exchange. In the proposed system, an optical BB84-type QKD link operates in coordination with a parallel wired KLJN link, which is used for secure basis handling and, in selected protocols, additional raw key generation. Three novel KLJN-assisted QKD protocols are introduced to eliminate public basis disclosure messages and bit sifting, extract basis-derived key bits, or generate raw key bits under ideal KLJN assumptions. Analytical expressions for the normalized key rate and absolute throughput are derived by accounting for optical channel penalties, KLJN bandwidth constraints, and synchronization bottlenecks. Numerical results show that the proposed hybrid architecture can improve key generation efficiency and throughput in short-haul infrastructures, including metropolitan area networks (MANs) and data center interconnects. Comments: 5 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, under review for publication Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Information Theory (cs.IT) Cite as: arXiv:2605.15247 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2605.15247v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.15247 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Ertugrul Basar [view email] [v1] Thu, 14 May 2026 11:09:06 UTC (136 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CR cs.IT math math.IT References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)