Prerequisites

The ‘remotecrypto’ directory contains the core processing programs for a BB84 type key generation scheme. In order to work properly with the hardware, the user program for the timestamp card, and a device driver for the appropriate interface are needed as well. For the USB-interfaced timestamp card, these directories are usbtimetagdriver and timestamp3, or the earlier version timestamp2. For the PCI card based version, a nudaq7200 driver and the timestamp directory is needed.

The error correction suite can be found in the ec2 directory, also outside the core ‘remotecrypto’ directory.

For proper operation of the gui running on TCL/TK, the following links from external directories into ‘remotecrypto’ directory are needed (symbolic links can be thought of as shortcuts to the actual programs):

A symbolic link to the current readevents program should be set under the name “readevents”. This can be done e.g. with the command

ln -s ../readevents4/readevents4a ./readevents

The readevents program is the user side part of the interface to talk to the timestamp card. It tries to efficiently (as in avoidance of memcpy type code) parse the raw data containing the phase pattern, coarse and fine counter info, and event register into a single timestamp structure of 64 bit. There is an option to splice in individual detector delays, and an absolute time information from the system gettime call. This is the default operation for the crypto applicatons.

Another symbolic link is needed for getting the error correction deamon running; target name has to be “errcd”. This can be done with the command

ln -s ../ec2/ecd2 errcd