Expansion and amplification of weak randomness plays a crucial role in many security protocols. Using quantum devices, such procedure is possible even without trusting the devices used, by utilizing correlations between outcomes of parts of the devices. We show here how to extract random bits with an arbitrarily low bias from a single arbitrarily weak min-entropy source in a device independent setting. To do this we use Mermin devices that exhibit super-classical correlations. Number of devices used scales polynomially in the length of the random sequence $n$. Our protocol is robust, it can tolerate devices that malfunction with a probability dropping polynomially in $n$ at the cost of a minor increase of the number of devices used.
Do completely unpredictable events exist in nature? Classical theory, being fully deterministic, completely excludes fundamental randomness. On the contrary, quantum theory allows for randomness within its axiomatic structure. Yet, the fact that a theory makes prediction only in probabilistic terms does not imply the existence of any form of randomness in nature. The question then remains whether one can certify randomness independent of the physical framework used. While standard Bell tests approach this question from this perspective, they require prior perfect randomness, which renders the …
We demonstrate that amplification of arbitrarily weak randomness is possible using quantum resources. We present a randomness amplification protocol that involves Bell experiments. We find a Bell inequality which can amplify arbitrarily weak randomness and give a detailed analysis of the protocol involving it. Our analysis includes finding a sufficient violation of Bell inequality as a function of the initial quality of randomness. It has a very important property that for any quality the required violation is strictly lower than possible to obtain using quantum resources. Among other things, …
We determine the secrecy capacities under common randomness assisted coding of arbitrarily varying classical-quantum wiretap channels.Furthermore, we determine the secrecy capacity of a mixed channel model which is compound from the sender to the legal receiver and varies arbitrarily from the sender to the eavesdropper. As an application we examine when the secrecy capacity is a continuous function of the system parameters and show that resources, i.e., having access to a perfect copy of the outcome of a random experiment. are helpful for channel stability.
According to quantum theory, the outcomes obtained by measuring an entangled state necessarily exhibit some randomness if they violate a Bell inequality. In particular, a maximal violation of the CHSH inequality guarantees that 1.23 bits of randomness are generated by the measurements. However, by performing measurements with binary outcomes on two subsystems one could in principle generate up to two bits of randomness. We show that correlations that violate arbitrarily little the CHSH inequality or states with arbitrarily little entanglement can be used to certify that close to the maximum of…
As our main result we show that, in order to achieve the randomness assisted message - and entanglement transmission capacities of a finite arbitrarily varying quantum channel it is not necessary that sender and receiver share (asymptotically perfect) common randomness. Rather, it is sufficient that they each have access to an unlimited amount of uses of one part of a correlated bipartite source. This access might be restricted to an arbitrary small (nonzero) fraction per channel use, without changing the main result. We investigate the notion of common randomness. It turns out that this is a …
The Born's rule introduces intrinsic randomness to the outcomes of a measurement performed on a quantum mechanical system. But, if the system is prepared in the eigenstate of an observable then the measurement outcome of that observable is completely predictable and hence there is no intrinsic randomness. On the other hand, if two incompatible observables are measured (either sequentially on a particle or simultaneously on two identical copies of the particle) then uncertainty principle guarantees intrinsic randomness in the subsequent outcomes independent of the preparation state of the syste…
Randomness is a central feature of quantum mechanics and an invaluable resource for both classical and quantum technologies. Commonly, in Device-Independent and Semi-Device-Independent scenarios, randomness is certified using projective measurements and the amount of certified randomness is bounded by the dimension of the measured quantum system. In this work, we propose a new Source-Device-Independent protocol, based on Positive Operator Valued Measurement (POVM), which can arbitrarily increase the number of certified bits for any fixed dimension. A tight lower-bound on the quantum conditiona…
In this paper, we analyze several critical issues in semi-device independent quantum information processing protocol. In practical experimental realization randomness generation in that scenario is possible only if the efficiency of the detectors used is above a certain threshold. Our analysis shows that the critical detection efficiency is 0.7071 in the symmetric setup, while in the asymmetric setup if one of the bases has perfect critical detection efficiency then the other one can be arbitrarily close to 0. We also analyze the semi-device independent random number generation efficiency base…
Are there fundamentally random processes in nature? Theoretical predictions, confirmed experimentally, such as the violation of Bell inequalities, point to an affirmative answer. However, these results are based on the assumption that measurement settings can be chosen freely at random, so assume the existence of perfectly free random processes from the outset. Here we consider a scenario in which this assumption is weakened and show that partially free random bits can be amplified to make arbitrarily free ones. More precisely, given a source of random bits whose correlation with other variabl…
In randomness amplification a slightly random source is used to produce an improved random source. Perhaps surprisingly, a single source of randomness cannot be amplified at all classically. However, the situation is different if one considers correlations allowed by quantum mechanics as an extra resource. Here we present a protocol that amplifies Santha-Vazirani sources arbitrarily close to deterministic into fully random sources. The protocol is device independent, depending only on the observed statistics of the devices and on the validity of the no-signaling principle between different dev…
In quantum cryptography, device-independent (DI) protocols can be certified secure without requiring assumptions about the inner workings of the devices used to perform the protocol. In order to display nonlocality, which is an essential feature in DI protocols, the device must consist of at least two separate components sharing entanglement. This raises a fundamental question: how much entanglement is needed to run such DI protocols? We present a two-device protocol for DI random number generation (DIRNG) which produces approximately $n$ bits of randomness starting from $n$ pairs of arbitrari…
It has been shown that the conditional probability distributions obtained by performing measurements on an uncharacterized physical system can be used to infer its underlying dimension in a device-independent way both in the classical and quantum setting. We analyze several aspects of the structure of the sets of probability distributions corresponding to a certain dimension taking into account whether shared randomness is available as a resource or not. We first consider the so-called prepare-and-measure scenario. We show that quantumness and shared randomness are not comparable resources. Th…
How to generate provably true randomness with minimal assumptions? This question is important not only for the efficiency and the security of information processing, but also for understanding how extremely unpredictable events are possible in Nature. All current solutions require special structures in the initial source of randomness, or a certain independence relation among two or more sources. Both types of assumptions are impossible to test and difficult to guarantee in practice. Here we show how this fundamental limit can be circumvented by extractors that base security on the validity of…
Randomness is an important resource for many applications, from gambling to secure communication. However, guaranteeing that the output from a candidate random source could not have been predicted by an outside party is a challenging task, and many supposedly random sources used today provide no such guarantee. Quantum solutions to this problem exist, for example a device which internally sends a photon through a beam-splitter and observes on which side it emerges, but, presently, such solutions require the user to trust the internal workings of the device. Here we seek to go beyond this limit…
This work is motivated by a quite general question: Under which circumstances are the capacities of information transmission systems continuous? The research is explicitly carried out on arbitrarily varying quantum channels (AVQCs). We give an explicit example that answers the recent question whether the transmission of messages over AVQCs can benefit from distribution of randomness between the legitimate sender and receiver in the affirmative. The specific class of channels introduced in that example is then extended to show that the deterministic capacity does have discontinuity points, whil…
We present a random number generation scheme that uses broadband measurements of the vacuum field contained in the radio-frequency sidebands of a single-mode laser. Even though the measurements may contain technical noise, we show that suitable algorithms can transform the digitized photocurrents into a string of random numbers that can be made arbitrarily correlated with a subset of the quantum fluctuations (high quantum correlation regime) or arbitrarily immune to environmental fluctuations (high environmental immunity). We demonstrate up to 2 Gbps of real time random number generation that …
Quantum Bell nonlocality allows for the design of protocols that amplify the randomness of public and arbitrarily biased Santha-Vazirani sources, a classically impossible task. Information-theoretical security in these protocols is certified in a device-independent manner, i.e. solely from the observed nonlocal statistics and without any assumption about the inner-workings of the intervening devices. On the other hand, if one is willing to trust on a complete quantum-mechanical description of a protocol's devices, the elementary scheme in which a qubit is alternatively measured in a pair of mu…
Randomness is a valuable resource in science, cryptography, engineering, and information technology. Quantum-mechanical sources of randomness are attractive because of the indeterminism of individual quantum processes. Here we consider the production of random bits from polarization measurements on photons. We first present a pedagogical discussion of how the quantum randomness inherent in such measurements is connected to quantum coherence, and how it can be quantified in terms of the quantum state and an associated entropy value known as min-entropy. We then explore these concepts by perform…
Non-local correlations that obey the no-signalling principle contain intrinsic randomness. In particular, for a specific Bell experiment, one can derive relations between the amount of randomness produced, as quantified by the min-entropy of the output data, and its associated violation of a Bell inequality. In practice, due to finite sampling, certifying randomness requires the development of statistical tools to lower-bound the min-entropy of the data as a function of the estimated Bell violation. The quality of such bounds relies on the choice of certificate, i.e., the Bell inequality whose…
Certification of quantum systems and their properties has become a field of intensive studies. Here, taking advantage of the one-sided device-independent scenario (known also as quantum steering scenario), we propose a self-testing scheme for all bipartite entangled states using a single family of steering inequalities with the minimal number of two measurements per party. Building on this scheme we then show how to certify all rank-one extremal measurements, including non-projective $d^2$-outcome measurements, which in turn can be used for certification of the maximal amount of randomness fro…
Semi-device-independent randomness certification on discretized continuous-variable platforms
Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte（北里奥格兰德联邦大学）；International Institute of Physics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte（北里奥格兰德联邦大学国际物理研究所）；QuIIN - Quantum Industrial Innovation, EMBRAPII CIMATEC Competence Center in Quantum Technologies, SENAI CIMATEC（QuIIN量子工业创新，EMBRAPII CIMATEC量子技术能力中心，SENAI CIMATEC）；Center for Macroscopic Quantum States bigQ, Department of Physics, Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学宏观量子态bigQ研究中心）
Alice and Bob each have half of a pair of entangled qubits. Bob measures his half and then passes his qubit to a second Bob who measures again and so on. The goal is to maximize the number of Bobs that can have an expected violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) Bell inequality with the single Alice. This scenario was introduced in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 250401 (2015)] where the authors mentioned evidence that when the Bobs act independently and with unbiased inputs then at most two of them can expect to violate the CHSH inequality with Alice. Here we show that, contrary to this evi…
How to generate genuine quantum randomness from untrusted devices is an important problem in quantum information processing. Inspired by previous work on a self-testing quantum random number generator [T. Lunghi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 150501 (2015)], we present a method to generate quantum randomness from a prepare-and-measure scenario with independent devices. In existing protocols, the quantum randomness depends only on a witness value (e.g., Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt value), which is calculated with the observed probabilities. Differently, here all the observed probabilities are dir…
In a no-signaling world, the outputs of a nonlocal box cannot be completely predetermined, a feature that is exploited in many quantum information protocols exploiting non-locality, such as device-independent randomness generation and quantum key distribution. This relation between non-locality and randomness can be formally quantified through the min-entropy, a measure of the unpredictability of the outputs that holds conditioned on the knowledge of any adversary that is limited only by the no-signaling principle. This quantity can easily be computed for the noisy Popescu-Rohrlich (PR) box, t…
We investigate sampling procedures that certify that an arbitrary quantum state on $n$ subsystems is close to an ideal mixed state $φ^{\otimes n}$ for a given reference state $φ$, up to errors on a few positions. This task makes no sense classically: it would correspond to certifying that a given bitstring was generated according to some desired probability distribution. However, in the quantum case, this is possible if one has access to a prover who can supply a purification of the mixed state. In this work, we introduce the concept of mixed-state certification, and we show that a natural sam…
Within the simultaneous message passing model of communication complexity, under a public-coin assumption, we derive the minimum achievable worst-case error probability of a classical fingerprinting protocol with one-sided error. We then present entanglement-assisted quantum fingerprinting protocols attaining worst-case error probabilities that breach this bound.
Recently, a physically realistic protocol amplifying the randomness of Santha-Vazirani sources producing cryptographically secure random bits was proposed; however for reasons of practical relevance, the crucial question remained open whether this can be accomplished under the minimal conditions necessary for the task. Namely, is it possible to achieve randomness amplification using only two no-signaling components and in a situation where the violation of a Bell inequality only guarantees that some outcomes of the device for specific inputs exhibit randomness? Here, we solve this question and…
Lund University（隆德大学）；University of Jyväskylä（于韦斯屈莱大学）；Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
We compare the power of quantum and classical physics in terms of randomness certification from devices which are only partially characterised. We study randomness certification based on state discrimination and take noncontextuality as the notion of classicality. A contextual advantage was recently shown to exist for state discrimination. Here, we develop quantum and noncontextual semi-device independent protocols for random-number generation based on maximum-confidence discrimination, which generalises unambiguous and minimum-error state discrimination. We show that, for quantum eavesdropppe…
Random numbers are a fundamental and useful resource in science and engineering with important applications in simulation, machine learning and cyber-security. Quantum systems can produce true random numbers because of the inherent randomness at the core of quantum mechanics. As a consequence, quantum random number generators are an efficient method to generate random numbers on a large scale. We study in this paper the applications of a viable source of unbiased quantum random numbers (QRNs) whose statistical properties can be arbitrarily programmed without the need for any post-processing an…
The phase randomized light is one of the key assumptions in the security proof of Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol implemented with an attenuated laser. Though the assumption has been believed to be satisfied for conventional systems, it should be reexamined for current high speed QKD systems. The phase correlation may be induced by the overlap of the optical pulses, the interval of which decreases as the clock frequency. The phase randomness was investigated experimentally by measuring the visibility of interference. An asymmetric Mach-Zehnder interferomete…
Applications of randomness such as private key generation and public randomness beacons require small blocks of certified random bits on demand. Device-independent quantum random number generators can produce such random bits, but existing quantum-proof protocols and loophole-free implementations suffer from high latency, requiring many hours to produce any random bits. We demonstrate device-independent quantum randomness generation from a loophole-free Bell test with a more efficient quantum-proof protocol, obtaining multiple blocks of $512$ bits with an average experiment time of less than $…
We consider a model of communication via a fully quantum jammer channel with quantum jammer, quantum sender and quantum receiver, which we dub quantum arbitrarily varying channel (QAVC). Restricting to finite dimensional user and jammer systems, we show, using permutation symmetry and a de Finetti reduction, how the random coding capacity (classical and quantum) of the QAVC is reduced to the capacity of a naturally associated compound channel, which is obtained by restricting the jammer to i.i.d. input states. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the shared randomness required is at most logarithm…
Device-independent randomness generation and quantum key distribution protocols rely on a fundamental relation between the non-locality of quantum theory and its random character. This relation is usually expressed in terms of a trade-off between the probability of guessing correctly the outcomes of measurements performed on quantum systems and the amount of violation of a given Bell inequality. However, a more accurate assessment of the randomness produced in Bell experiments can be obtained if the value of several Bell expressions is simultaneously taken into account, or if the full set of p…
In classical and quantum information theory, operational quantities such as the amount of randomness that can be extracted from a given source or the amount of space needed to store given data are normally characterized by one of two entropy measures, called smooth min-entropy and smooth max-entropy, respectively. While both entropies are equal to the von Neumann entropy in certain special cases (e.g., asymptotically, for many independent repetitions of the given data), their values can differ arbitrarily in the general case. In this work, a recently discovered duality relation between (non-sm…
In this paper we study von Neumann un-biasing normalisation for ideal and real quantum random number generators, operating on finite strings or infinite bit sequences. In the ideal cases one can obtain the desired un-biasing. This relies critically on the independence of the source, a notion we rigorously define for our model. In real cases, affected by imperfections in measurement and hardware, one cannot achieve a true un-biasing, but, if the bias "drifts sufficiently slowly", the result can be arbitrarily close to un-biasing. For infinite sequences, normalisation can both increase or decrea…
Semi-device independent (Semi-DI) quantum random number generators (QRNG) gained attention for security applications, offering an excellent trade-off between security and generation rate. This paper presents a proof-of-principle time-bin encoding semi-DI QRNG experiments based on a prepare-and-measure scheme. The protocol requires two simple assumptions and a measurable condition: an upper-bound on the prepared pulses' energy. We lower-bound the conditional min-entropy from the energy-bound and the input-output correlation, determining the amount of genuine randomness that can be certified. Mo…
The generation of random numbers via quantum processes is an efficient and reliable method to obtain true indeterministic random numbers that are of vital importance to cryptographic communication and large-scale computer modeling. However, in realistic scenarios, the raw output of a quantum random-number generator is inevitably tainted by classical technical noise. The integrity of the device can be compromised if this noise is tampered with, or even controlled by some malicious party. To safeguard against this, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an approach that produces side-informat…
Noise robustness of three outcome Bell certified quantum randomness
ICFO-Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology（光子科学研究所，巴塞罗那科学技术学院）；Center for Theoretical Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院理论物理中心）；Department of Algorithms and System Modeling, Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, Gdańsk University of Technology（格但斯克理工大学电子、电信与信息学院算法与系统建模系）；ICREA-Institucio Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats（加泰罗尼亚研究与高级研究学院）
We study the Hamiltonian associated with the quantum adiabatic algorithm with a random cost function. Because the cost function lacks structure we can prove results about the ground state. We find the ground state energy as the number of bits goes to infinity, show that the minimum gap goes to zero exponentially quickly, and we see a localization transition. We prove that there are no levels approaching the ground state near the end of the evolution. We do not know which features of this model are shared by a quantum adiabatic algorithm applied to random instances of satisfiability since despi…
