QKD-XGuard: Physics-Informed Conformal Open-Set Monitoring for Unseen and Adaptive Attacks in Decoy-State BB84
Abstract
Abstract Practical quantum key distribution (QKD) is secure only to the extent that a deployed implementation remains compatible with the physical and statistical assumptions used in its security analysis. Scalar quantum bit error rate (QBER) monitoring cannot, by itself, distinguish legitimate channel drift from all implementation-level attacks, and conventional supervised classifiers usually assume that every test-time attack family was represented during training. This work presents QKD-XGuard, a simulation-validated monitoring method for decoy-state BB84 that combines physics-informed residuals, temporal feature encoding, metric-structured latent representations, class-conditional conformal prediction, and explicit open-set rejection. The method models expected signal/decoy gains, error rates, single-photon behavior, key-rate consistency, and detector statistics; it then learns from deviations between measured and physically expected telemetry rather than from raw measurements alone. A reproducible stochastic block-level simulator was used to generate 3,500 developmentregime sessions spanning normal operation and four attack families, with 16 telemetry blocks per session. Entire attack families were excluded from training in four leave-one-family-out folds. Across these folds, the physics-residual model achieved known-class macro-F1 of 0.952 ± 0.007, unknown-attack AUROC of 0.945 ± 0.049, unknown recall of 0.876 ± 0.137, and empirical class-conditional conformal coverage…
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