Security proof for QKD systems with threshold detectors

In this paper, we rigorously prove the intuition that in security proofs for BB84 one may regard an incoming signal to Bob as a qubit state. From this result, it follows that all security proofs for BB84 based on a virtual qubit entanglement distillation protocol, which was originally proposed by Lo and Chau [H.-K. Lo and H. F. Chau, Science 283, 2050 (1999)], and Shor and Preskill [P. W. Shor and J. Preskill, Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 441 (2000)], are all valid even if Bob's actual apparatus cannot distill a qubit state explicitly. As a consequence, especially, the well-known result that a higher bit error rate of 20% can be tolerated for BB84 protocol by using two-way classical communications is still valid even when Bob uses threshold detectors. Using the same technique, we also prove the security of the Bennett-Brassard-Mermin 1992 (BBM92) protocol where Alice and Bob both use threshold detectors.