QOSST - Quantum Open Software for Secure Transmissions

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This repo serves two purposes: the first is to explain how the code quality of QOSST and the second one is to give a general introduction to QOSST.

QOSST was initially developed in the Quantum Information (QI) team of the LIP6 laboratory in Sorbonne Université.

Article

The article associated to this publication can be found on the arXiv: arXiv:2404.18637.

Here is the bibtex to cite this paper:

@misc{pietri2024qosst,
      title={QOSST: A Highly-Modular Open Source Platform for Experimental Continuous-Variable Quantum Key Distribution}, 
      author={Yoann Piétri and Matteo Schiavon and Valentina Marulanda Acosta and Baptiste Gouraud and Luis Trigo Vidarte and Philippe Grangier and Amine Rhouni and Eleni Diamanti},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2404.18637},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={id='quant-ph' full_name='Quantum Physics' is_active=True alt_name=None in_archive='quant-ph' is_general=False description=None}
}

Structure

The QOSST software is separated in 7 submodules:

• qosst-core for the configuration, control protocol, and common functions to Alice and Bob;
• qosst-alice for the digital signal processing (DSP), server, and interaction with the hardware for Alice;
• qosst-bob for the digital signal processing (DSP), client, interaction with the hardware, parameters estimation for Bob.;
• qosst-hal for hardware abstraction layer;
• qosst-skr for the secret key rate computations;
• qosst-sim for the simulations;
• qosst-pp for the post processing.

To operate Alice, it is only necessary to install the qosst-alice package. The other packages that are required will be automatically installed. The same applies for qosst-bob.

Links and documentation

Name	URL	Documentation
qosst-core	https://github.com/qosst/qosst-core	https://qosst-core.readthedocs.io/
qosst-hal	https://github.com/qosst/qosst-hal	https://qosst-hal.readthedocs.io/
qosst-alice	https://github.com/qosst/qosst-alice	https://qosst-alice.readthedocs.io/
qosst-bob	https://github.com/qosst/qosst-bob	https://qosst-bob.readthedocs.io/
qosst-skr	https://github.com/qosst/qosst-skr	https://qosst-skr.readthedocs.io/
qosst-sim	https://github.com/qosst/qosst-sim	https://qosst-sim.readthedocs.io/
qosst-pp	Not released	Not released.

Code quality

The code quality of the QOSST submodules are checked via three tools:

• pylint for the static linting;
• mypy for the type hints checking;
• docstr-coverage for checking the coverage of documentation.

The script code_quality.py automatically applies all the checks to all the submodules.

Additionally, the QOSST submodules are formatted with black.

License

The submodules of QOSST are shipped under the Gnu General Public License v3.

Contributing

Report issues

Reporting issues is the first way to contribute to the software.

You can report global issue with the software on the issues tracker of QOSST at https://github.com/qosst/qosst/issues.

It is however preferable to use the specialized repo for issues that are specific to a module:

Module	URL of the issues tracker
qosst-core	https://github.com/qosst/qosst-core/issues
qosst-hal	https://github.com/qosst/qosst-hal/issues
qosst-alice	https://github.com/qosst/qosst-alice/issues
qosst-bob	https://github.com/qosst/qosst-bob/issues
qosst-skr	https://github.com/qosst/qosst-skr/issues
qosst-sim	https://github.com/qosst/qosst-sim/issues

Please include the following information when reporting a bug

• description of the bug;
• versions of the QOSST software;
• configuration file;
• used hardware, if relevant;
• logs of the error.

When requesting new feature, please provide a detailed description of what you propose and any reference that could be relevant.

Proposing code

You can propose code, either to solve issues or to propose new features directly.

If you want to solve an issue please comment on the issue on the issue tracker so we can assign the assign to you.

Here are the steps you should do:

1. Fork the repository on your github account;
2. Clone your forked repository;
3. Make the changes and commit;
4. Push to your forked repository;
5. Open a Pull Request on the associated repository.

We will then check the changes and merge when it's ready.

Acknowledgments

We first thank the direct contributors of the code:

• Yoann Piétri
• Valentina Marulanda Acosta
• Matteo Schiavon
• Mayeul Chavanne
• Ilektra Karakosta - Amarantidou

We also thank all the persons that made comments and discussions that had a direct impact on this software:

• Luis-Trigo Vidarte
• Baptiste Gouraud
• Amine Rhouni
• Eleni Diamanti
• Philippe Grangier

And finally we thank the persons that participated in some ways to the development of QOSST:

• Thomas Liege
• George Crisan
• Damien Fruleux
• Sarah Layani
• Manon Huguenot