We propose a general security definition for cryptographic quantum protocols that implement classical non-reactive two-party tasks. The definition is expressed in terms of simple quantum-information-theoretic conditions which must be satisfied by the protocol to be secure. The conditions are uniquely determined by the ideal functionality F defining the cryptographic task to be implemented. We then show the following composition result. If quantum protocols pi_1,...,pi_k securely implement ideal functionalities F_1,...,F_k according to our security definition, then any purely classical two-party protocol, which makes sequential calls to F_1,...,F_k, is equally secure as the protocol obtained by replacing the calls to F_1,...,F_k with the respective quantum protocols pi_1,...,pi_k. Hence, our approach yields the minimal security requirements which are strong enough for the typical use of quantum protocols as subroutines within larger classical schemes. Finally, we show that recently proposed quantum protocols for oblivious transfer and secure identification in the bounded-quantum-storage model satisfy our security definition, and thus compose in the above sense.
We find a universal lower bound on locally accessible information for arbitrary bipartite quantum ensembles, when one of the parties is two-dimensional. In higher dimensions and in higher number of parties, the lower bound is on accessible information by separable operations. We show that for any given density matrix (of arbitrary number of parties and dimensions), there exists an ensemble, the ''Scrooge ensemble'', which averages to the given density matrix and whose locally accessible information saturates the lower bound. Moreover, we use this lower bound along with a previously obtained up…
Single photon sources (SPS) are a fundamental building block for optical implementations of quantum information protocols. Among SPSs, multiple crystal heralded single photon sources seem to give the best compromise between high pair production rate and low multiple photon events. In this work, we study their performance in a practical quantum key distribution experiment, by evaluating the achievable key rates. The analysis focuses on the two different schemes, symmetric and asymmetric, proposed for the practical implementation of heralded single photon sources, with attention on the performan…
In this article, we review several aspects of composability in the context of quantum cryptography. The first part is devoted to key distribution. We discuss the security criteria that a quantum key distribution protocol must fulfill to allow its safe use within a larger security application (e.g., for secure message transmission). To illustrate the practical use of composability, we show how to generate a continuous key stream by sequentially composing rounds of a quantum key distribution protocol. In a second part, we take a more general point of view, which is necessary for the study of cry…
The effect of noise on various protocols of secure quantum communication has been studied. Specifically, we have investigated the effect of amplitude damping, phase damping, squeezed generalized amplitude damping, Pauli type as well as various collective noise models on the protocols of quantum key distribution, quantum key agreement,quantum secure direct quantum communication and quantum dialogue. From each type of protocol of secure quantum communication, we have chosen two protocols for our comparative study; one based on single qubit states and the other one on entangled states. The compar…
Experimental Simulation of Two Pulses and Three Pulses Coherent One Way Quantum Key Distribution Protocol in Noisy/Noiseless and Wired/Wireless Environment
In the well-studied cryptographic primitive 1-out-of-N oblivious transfer, a user retrieves a single element from a database of size N without the database learning which element was retrieved. While it has previously been shown that a secure implementation of 1-out-of-N oblivious transfer is impossible against arbitrarily powerful adversaries, recent research has revealed an interesting class of private query protocols based on quantum mechanics in a cheat sensitive model. Specifically, a practical protocol does not need to guarantee that database cannot learn what element was retrieved if do…
We analyze the relationship between qubit-environment entanglement that can be created during the pure dephasing of the qubit and the effectiveness of the spin echo protocol. We focus here on mixed states of the environment. We show that while the echo protocol can obviously counteract classical environmental noise, it can also undo dephasing associated with qubit-environment entanglement, and there is no obvious difference in its efficiency in these two cases. Additionally, we show that qubit-environment entanglement can be generated at the end of the echo protocol even when it is absent at t…
Quantum information protocols are inevitably affected by decoherence which is associated with the leakage of quantum information into an environment. In this paper we address the possibility of recovering the quantum information from an environmental measurement. We investigate continuous variable quantum information, and we propose a simple environmental measurement that under certain circumstances fully restores the quantum information of the signal state although the state is not reconstructed with unit fidelity. We implement the protocol for which information is encoded into conjugate quad…
Blind quantum computation (BQC) is a new type of quantum computation model. BQC allows a client (Alice) who does not have enough sophisticated technology and knowledge to perform universal quantum computation and resorts a remote quantum computation server (Bob) to delegate universal quantum computation. During the computation, Bob cannot know Alice's inputs, algorithm and outputs. In single-server BQC protocol, it requires Alice to prepare and distribute single-photon states to Bob. Unfortunately, the distributed single photons will suffer from noise, which not only makes the single-photon st…
In this work, a novel protocol is proposed for bidirectional controlled quantum teleportation (BCQT) in which a quantum channel is used with the eight-qubit entangled state. Using the protocol, two users can teleport an arbitrary entangled state and a pure two-qubit state (QBS) to each other simultaneously under the permission of a third party in the role of controller. This protocol is based on the controlled-not operation, appropriate single-qubit (SIQ) UOs and SIQ measurements in the Z and X-basis. Reduction of the predictability of the controller's qubit (QB) by the eavesdropper and also, …
Private comparison is a primitive for many cryptographic tasks, and recently several schemes for the quantum private comparison (QPC) have been proposed, where two users can compare the equality of their secrets with the help of a semi-honest third party (TP) without knowing each other's secret and without disclosing the same to the TP. In the exisiting schemes, secrecy is obtained by using conjugate coding, and considering all participants as quantum users who can perform measurement(s) and/or create states in basis other than computational basis. In contrast, here we propose two new protocol…
We propose a straightforward experimental protocol to test whether qubit-environment entanglement is generated during pure dephasing of a qubit. The protocol is implemented using only measurements and operations on the qubit - it does not involve the measurement of the system-environment state of interest, but the preparation and measurement of the qubit in two simple variations. A difference in the time dependencies of qubit coherence between the two cases testifies to the presence of entanglement in the state of interest. Furthermore, it signifies that the environment-induced noise experienc…
In this paper we discuss a quantum multi-tasking protocol for preparation of known one-qubit and two-qubit states respectively in two different locations. The ideal remote state preparation protocol is discussed in the first place in which a five-qubit entangled state is utilized. The design for the preparation of such entanglement is also presented and run on IBM quantum composer platform. The effects of three types of noises on the protocol are discussed and in all these cases the reduced fidelities of the process are calculated. The variations of these fidelities with respect to different p…
Kak's three-stage protocol for quantum key distribution is revisited with special focus on its hitherto unknown strengths and weaknesses. It is shown that this protocol can be used for secure direct quantum communication. Further, the implementability of this protocol in the realistic situation is analyzed by considering various Markovian noise models. It is found that the Kak's protocol and its variants in their original form can be implemented only in a restricted class of noisy channels, where the protocols can be transformed to corresponding protocols based on logical qubits in decoherence…
Coherent interaction of a quantum system with environment usually induces quantum decoherence. However, remarkably, in certain configurations the coherent system-environment coupling can be simultaneously explored to engineer a specific dark state of the environment that eliminates the decoherence. Here we report on experimental demonstration of such protocol for suppression of quantum decoherence by quantum decoherence itself. The protocol is based on indirect control of the environment via quantum measurements on quantum probes interacting with the environment prior to the system that should…
The one-qubit teleportation protocol is reexamined when it is executed in the presence of various decohering environments. The results revealed that this quantum protocol is more robust under the influence of dephaisng environment than those under the influence of dissipative or noisy environment. The environment may deprive the quantum advantage of teleportation over purely classical communication in a finite or infinite lifetime, which is dependent on the type of environment. Also we found that except entanglement, the purity of the entangled state resource is also crucial in determine the q…
We report experimental results on the action of selected local environments on the fidelity of the quantum teleportation protocol, taking into account non-ideal, realistic entangled resources. Different working conditions are theoretically identified, where a noisy protocol can be made almost insensitive to further addition of noise. We put to test these conditions on a photonic implementation of the quantum teleportation algorithm, where two polarization entangled qubits act as the entangled resource and a path qubit on Alice encodes the state to be teleported. Bob's path qubit is used to imp…
It is shown that a realistic, controlled bidirectional remote state preparation is possible using a large class of entangled quantum states having a particular structure. Existing protocols of probabilistic, deterministic and joint remote state preparation are generalized to obtain the corresponding protocols of controlled bidirectional remote state preparation (CBRSP). A general way of incorporating the effects of two well known noise processes, the amplitude-damping and phase-damping noise, on the probabilistic CBRSP process is studied in detail by considering that noise only affects the tra…
We propose an entanglement purification protocol for high-dimensional multipartite systems. In the protocol we can select a subensemble in a pure generalized Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state. This post-selection can be made by detecting the noise which contaminated the initial pure ensemble when the systems past through a noisy environment. For the detection of noise we investigate correlation properties of GHZ states and analyze their possible errors due to a noisy environment. We show that the presented protocol is more efficient than a simple generalization of the purification protoc…
We study how to protect quantum information in quantum systems subjected to local dissipation. We show that combining the use of three-level systems, environment monitoring, and local feedback can fully and deterministically protect any available quantum information, including entanglement initially shared by different parties. These results can represent a gain in resources and/or distances in quantum communication protocols such as quantum repeaters and teleportation as well as time for quantum memories. Finally, we show that monitoring local environments physically implements the optimum si…
It is widely spread in the literature that non-Markovianity (NM) may be regarded as a resource in quantum mechanics. However, it is still unclear how and when this alleged resource may be exploited. Here, we study the relationship between NM and quantum optimal control under the objective of generating entanglement within M non-interacting subsystems, each one coupled to the same non-Markovian environment. Thus, we design a variety of entangling protocols that are only achievable due to the existence of the environment. We show that NM plays a crucial role in all the entangling protocols consi…
Multi-photon entangled states are a crucial resource for many applications in quantum information science. Semiconductor quantum dots offer a promising route to generate such states by mediating photon-photon correlations via a confined electron spin, but dephasing caused by the host nuclear spin environment typically limits coherence (and hence entanglement) between photons to the spin $T_2^*$ time of a few nanoseconds. We propose a protocol for the deterministic generation of multi-photon entangled states that is inherently robust against the dominating slow nuclear spin environment fluctuat…
Relativistic protocols have been proposed to overcome some impossibility results in classical and quantum cryptography. In such a setting, one takes the location of honest players into account, and uses the fact that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light to limit the abilities of dishonest agents. For example, various relativistic bit commitment protocols have been proposed. Although it has been shown that bit commitment is sufficient to construct oblivious transfer and thus multiparty computation, composing specific relativistic protocols in this way is known to be insecure…
We propose an efficient qubit initialization protocol based on a dissipative environment that can be dynamically adjusted. Here the qubit is coupled to a thermal bath through a tunable harmonic oscillator. On-demand initialization is achieved by sweeping the oscillator rapidly into resonance with the qubit. This resonant coupling with the engineered environment induces fast relaxation to the ground state of the system, and a consecutive rapid sweep back to off resonance guarantees weak excess dissipation during quantum computations. We solve the corresponding quantum dynamics using a Markovian…
We study the influence of a thermal environment on a non-adiabatic spin-flip driving protocol of spin-orbit qubits. The driving protocol operates by moving the qubit, trapped in a harmonic potential, along a nanowire in the presence of a time-dependent spin-orbit interaction. We consider the harmonic degrees of freedom to be weakly coupled to a thermal bath. We find an analytical expression for the Floquet states and derive the Lindblad equation for a strongly non-adiabatically driven qubit. The Lindblad equation corrects the dynamics of an isolated qubit with Lamb shift terms and a dissipativ…
We study the fidelity of quantum teleportation for the situation in which quantum logic gates are used to provide the long distance entanglement required in the protocol, and where the effect of a noisy environment is modeled by means of a generalized amplitude damping channel. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the quantum trajectories approach, which allows the simulation of open systems with a large number of qubits (up to 24). This shows that the method is suitable for modeling quantum information protocols in realistic environments.
We consider a quantum relay which is used by two parties to perform several continuous-variable protocols of quantum communication, from entanglement distribution (swapping and distillation), to quantum teleportation, and quantum key distribution. The theory of these protocols is suitably extended to a non-Markovian model of decoherence characterized by correlated Gaussian noise in the bosonic environment. In the worst case scenario where bipartite entanglement is completely lost at the relay, we show that the various protocols can be reactivated by the assistance of classical (separable) corr…
The theory of quantum trajectories is applied to simulate the effects of quantum noise sources induced by the environment on quantum information protocols. We study two models that generalize single qubit noise channels like amplitude damping and phase flip to the many-qubit situation. We calculate the fidelity of quantum information transmission through a chaotic channel using the teleportation scheme with different environments. In this example, we analyze the role played by the kind of collective noise suffered by the quantum processor during its operation. We also investigate the stability…
Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH)（圣地亚哥大学（USACH））；Center for the Development of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology（纳米科学与纳米技术发展中心）；University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU（巴斯克大学（UPV/EHU））；IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science（巴斯克科学基金会（IKERBASQUE））；Shanghai University（上海大学）
Machine learning employs dynamical algorithms that mimic the human capacity to learn, where the reinforcement learning ones are among the most similar to humans in this respect. On the other hand, adaptability is an essential aspect to perform any task efficiently in a changing environment, and it is fundamental for many purposes, such as natural selection. Here, we propose an algorithm based on successive measurements to adapt one quantum state to a reference unknown state, in the sense of achieving maximum overlap. The protocol naturally provides many identical copies of the reference state,…
