https://doi.org/10.1140/epjqt/s40507-025-00431-5
Research
Fault-tolerant and secure long-distance quantum communication via uncorrectable-error-injection
1
Quantum Network Research Center, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, 34141, Daejeon, Republic of Korea
2
Research Institute of Mathematics, Seoul National University, 08826, Seoul, Republic of Korea
3
School of Computational Sciences, Korea Institute for Advanced Study, 02455, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Received:
19
April
2025
Accepted:
13
October
2025
Published online:
11
November
2025
Quantum networks aim to facilitate the fault-tolerant and secure transmission of quantum states across distant devices. The widely adopted quantum teleportation scheme requires multiple rounds of entanglement swapping and purification, leading to significant resource overhead and operational complexity. In this study, we propose a novel fault-tolerant and secure quantum communication scheme based on uncorrectable error injection. Our method exploits a quantum state encoding scheme based on quantum error correction codes, which strategically introduces uncorrectable errors to enhance security. It eliminates the need for entanglement distribution while reducing resource requirements. The injected errors protect against eavesdropping by preventing unauthorized parties from retrieving meaningful information. Security analysis shows that as the data length and encoded message size increase, information leakage becomes negligible relative to the size of the total message. Comparative performance analysis with existing approaches indicates that our method reduces transmission overhead while maintaining comparable fidelity in low-error regimes. These findings suggest that the proposed method offers a scalable and practical alternative for secure long-distance quantum communication, distributed quantum computing, and future quantum internet applications.
Key words: Fault-tolerant quantum communication / Secure quantum communication / Quantum error correction code / Uncorrectable error injection
© The Author(s) 2025
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

