While it is usually known that the mean value of a single observable is enough to detect entanglement or its distillability, the counterpart of such an approach in the case of quantum privacy has been missing. Here we develop the concept of a privacy witness, i.e., a single observable that may detect the presence of the secure key even in the case of bound entanglement. Then we develop the notion of secret-key estimation based...

Quantum cryptography enables one to verify that the state of the quantum system has not been tampered with and thus one can obtain privacy regardless of the power of the eavesdropper. All previous protocols relied on the ability to faithfully send quantum states or equivalently to share pure entanglement. Here we show this need not be the case-one can obtain verifiable privacy even through some channels which cannot be used to...

Detecting and quantifying quantum entanglement of a given unknown state poses problems that are fundamentally important for quantum information processing. Surprisingly, no direct (i.e., without quantum tomography) universal experimental implementation of a necessary and sufficient test of entanglement has been designed even for a general two-qubit state. Here we propose an experimental method for detecting a collective universal...

We report experimental generation of a noisy entangled four-photon state that exhibits a separation between the secure key contents and distillable entanglement, a hallmark feature of the recently established quantum theory of private states. The privacy analysis, based on the full tomographic reconstruction of the prepared state, is utilized in a proof-of-principle key generation. The inferiority of distillation-based strategies...