The goal of two-party cryptography is to enable two parties, Alice and Bob, to solve common tasks without the need for mutual trust. Examples of such tasks are private access to a database, and secure identification. Quantum communication enables security for all of these problems in the noisy-storage model by sending more signals than the adversary can store in a certain time frame. Here, we initiate the study of device-independent protocols for two-party cryptography in the noisy-storage model. Specifically, we present a relatively easy to implement protocol for a cryptographic building block known as weak string erasure and prove its security even if the devices used in the protocol are prepared by the dishonest party. Device-independent two-party cryptography is made challenging by the fact that Alice and Bob do not trust each other, which requires new techniques to establish security. We fully analyse the case of memoryless devices (for which sequential attacks are optimal) and the case of sequential attacks for arbitrary devices. The key ingredient of the proof, which might be of independent interest, is an explicit (and tight) relation between the violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality observed by Alice and Bob and uncertainty generated by Alice against Bob who is forced to measure his system before finding out Alice's setting (guessing with postmeasurement information). In particular, we show that security is possible for arbitrarily small violation.
Quantum communication has demonstrated its usefulness for quantum cryptography far beyond quantum key distribution. One domain is two-party cryptography, whose goal is to allow two parties who may not trust each other to solve joint tasks. Another interesting application is position-based cryptography whose goal is to use the geographical location of an entity as its only identifying credential. Unfortunately, security of these protocols is not possible against an all powerful adversary. However, if we impose some realistic physical constraints on the adversary, there exist protocols for which…
In this paper, we present a quantum secure multi-party summation protocol, which allows multiple mutually distrustful parties to securely compute the summation of their secret data. In the presented protocol, a semitrusted third party is introduced to help multiple parties to achieve this secure task. Besides, the entanglement swapping of $d$-level cat states and Bell states is employed to securely transmit message between each party and the semitrusted third party. At last, its security against some common attacks is analyzed, which shows that the presented protocol is secure in theory.
A new cryptographic tool, anonymous quantum key technique, is introduced that leads to unconditionally secure key distribution and encryption schemes that can be readily implemented experimentally in a realistic environment. If quantum memory is available, the technique would have many features of public-key cryptography; an identification protocol that does not require a shared secret key is provided as an illustration. The possibility is also indicated for obtaining unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment protocols with this technique.
We study quantum protocols among two distrustful parties. Under the sole assumption of correctness - guaranteeing that honest players obtain their correct outcomes - we show that every protocol implementing a non-trivial primitive necessarily leaks information to a dishonest player. This extends known impossibility results to all non-trivial primitives. We provide a framework for quantifying this leakage and argue that leakage is a good measure for the privacy provided to the players by a given protocol. Our framework also covers the case where the two players are helped by a trusted third par…
Any two-party cryptographic primitive can be implemented using quantum communication under the assumption that it is difficult to store a large number of quantum states perfectly. However, achieving reliable quantum communication over long distances remains a difficult problem. Here, we consider a large network of nodes with only neighboring quantum links. We exploit properties of this cloud of nodes to enable any two nodes to achieve security even if they are not directly connected. Our results are based on techniques from classical cryptography and do not resort to technologically difficult …
We present a scheme for three-party simultaneous quantum secure direct communication by using EPR pairs. In the scheme, three legitimate parties can simultaneously exchange their secret messages. It is also proved to be secure against the intercept-and-resend attack, the disturbance attack and the entangled-and-measure attack.
We present a three-party simultaneous quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) scheme by using Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states. This scheme can be directly generalized to $N$-party QSDC by using $n$-particle GHZ states. We show that the many-party simultaneous QSDC scheme is secure not only against the intercept-and-resend attack but also against the disturbance attack.
Entanglement between three or more parties exhibits a realm of properties unknown to two-party states. Bipartite states are easily classified using the Schmidt decomposition. The Schmidt coefficients of a bipartite pure state encompass all the non-local properties of the state and can be "seen" by looking at one party's density matrix only. Pure states of three and more parties however lack such a simple form. They have more invariants under local unitary transformations than any one party can "see" on their sub-system. These "hidden non-localities" will allow us to exhibit a class of multipar…
We introduce relativistic multi-party biased die rolling protocols, generalizing coin flipping to $M \geq 2$ parties and to $N \geq 2$ outcomes for any chosen outcome biases, and show them unconditionally secure. Our results prove that the most general random secure multi-party computation, where all parties receive the output and there is no secret input by any party, can be implemented with unconditional security. Our protocols extend Kent's [A. Kent, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 5382 (1999)] two-party unbiased coin flipping protocol, do not require any quantum communication, are practical to implem…
Device-independent quantum cryptography allows security even if the devices used to execute the protocol are untrusted - whether this is due to unknown imperfections in the implementation, or because the adversary himself constructed them to subvert the security of the protocol. While device-independence has seen much attention in the domain of quantum key distribution, relatively little is known for general protocols. Here we introduce a new model for device-independence for two-party protocols and position verification in the noisy-storage model. For the first time, we show that such protoco…
I construct a secure multi-party scheme to compute a classical function by a succinct use of a specially designed fault-tolerant random polynomial quantum error correction code. This scheme is secure provided that (asymptotically) strictly greater than five-sixths of the players are honest. Moreover, the security of this scheme follows directly from the theory of quantum error correcting code, and hence is valid without any computational assumption. I also discuss the quantum-classical complexity-security tradeoff in secure multi-party computation schemes and argue why a full-blown quantum cod…
We introduce a scheme for secure multi-party computation utilising the quantum correlations of entangled states. First we present a scheme for two-party computation, exploiting the correlations of a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state to provide, with the help of a third party, a near-private computation scheme. We then present a variation of this scheme which is passively secure with threshold t=2, in other words, remaining secure when pairs of players conspire together provided they faithfully follow the protocol. We show that this can be generalised to computations of n-party polynomials of d…
Secure multi-party computing, also called "secure function evaluation", has been extensively studied in classical cryptography. We consider the extension of this task to computation with quantum inputs and circuits. Our protocols are information-theoretically secure, i.e. no assumptions are made on the computational power of the adversary. For the weaker task of verifiable quantum secret sharing, we give a protocol which tolerates any t < n/4 cheating parties (out of n). This is shown to be optimal. We use this new tool to show how to perform any multi-party quantum computation as long as the …
Recently, Yang et al. (Quantum Inf Process:17:129, 2018) proposed a secure multi-party quantum summation protocol allowing the involved participants to sum their secrets privately. They claimed that the proposed protocol can prevent each participant's secret from being known by others. However, this study shows that the participant who prepares the initial quantum states can obtain other participants' secrets with an inverse quantum Fourier transform attack. A modification is then proposed here to solve this problem.
We present a secure network communication system that operated with decoy-state quantum cryptography in a real-world application scenario. The full key exchange and application protocols were performed in real time among three nodes, in which two adjacent nodes were connected by approximate 20 km of commercial telecom optical fiber. The generated quantum keys were immediately employed and demonstrated for communication applications, including unbreakable real-time voice telephone between any two of the three communication nodes, or a broadcast from one node to the other two nodes by using one-…
A general study of arbitrary finite-size coherent attacks against continuous-variable quantum cryptographic schemes is presented. It is shown that, if the size of the blocks that can be coherently attacked by an eavesdropper is fixed and much smaller than the key size, then the optimal attack for a given signal-to-noise ratio in the transmission line is an individual gaussian attack. Consequently, non-gaussian coherent attacks do not need to be considered in the security analysis of such quantum cryptosystems.
We analyze the capacity of a simultaneous quantum secure direct communication scheme between the central party and other $M$ parties via $M+1$-particle GHZ states and swapping quantum entanglement. It is shown that the encoding scheme should be secret if other $M$ parties wants to transmit $M+1$ bit classical messages to the center party secretly. However when the encoding scheme is announced publicly, we prove that the capacity of the scheme in transmitting the secret messages is 2 bits, no matter how big $M$ is.
In this paper, we propose a novel secure multi-party quantum summation protocol based on quantum Fourier transform, where the traveling particles are transmitted in a tree-type mode. The party who prepares the initial quantum states is assumed to be semi-honest, which means that she may misbehave on her own but will not conspire with anyone. The proposed protocol can resist both the outside attacks and the participant attacks. Especially, one party cannot obtain other parties' private integer strings; and it is secure for the colluding attack performed by at most n-2 parties, where n is the nu…
Quantum cryptography is an emerging technology in which two parties may simultaneously generate shared, secret cryptographic key material using the transmission of quantum states of light. The security of these transmissions is based on the inviolability of the laws of quantum mechanics and information-theoretically secure post-processing methods. An adversary can neither successfully tap the quantum transmissions, nor evade detection, owing to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. In this paper we describe the theory of quantum cryptography, and the most recent results from our experimental fre…
We suggest that the randomness of the choices of measurement basis by Alice and Bob provides an additional important resource for quantum cryptography. As a specific application, we present a novel protocol for quantum key distribution (QKD) which enhances the BB84 scheme by encrypting the information sent over the classical channel during key sifting. We show that, in the limit of long keys, this process prevents an eavesdropper from reproducing the sifting process carried out by the legitimate users. The inability of the eavesdropper to sift the information gathered by tapping the quantum ch…
This paper studies secure multiparty quantum computation (SMQC) without nonlocal measurements. Firstly, this task is reduced to secure two-party quantum computation of nonlocal controlled-NOT (NL-CNOT) gate. Then, in the passive adversaries model, the secure computation of NL-CNOT is reduced to bit commitment. Thus, a SMQC scheme can be constructed based on bit commitment. This scheme does not depend on trusted third party, and is secure in the passive adversaries model. It is also pointed out that a vulnerability exists in any secure two-party quantum computation protocol of NL-CNOT gate.
In this paper, we build upon the model of two-party quantum computation introduced by Salvail et al. [SSS09] and show that in this model, only trivial correct two-party quantum protocols are weakly self-composable. We do so by defining a protocol Π, calling any non-trivial sub-protocol πN times and showing that there is a quantum honest-but-curious strategy that cannot be modeled by acting locally in every single copy of π. In order to achieve this, we assign a real value called "payoff" to any strategy for Πand show that that there is a gap between the highest payoff achievable by coherent an…
We propose a simultaneous quantum secure direct communication scheme between one party and other three parties via four-particle GHZ states and swapping quantum entanglement. In the scheme, three spatially separated senders, Alice, Bob and Charlie, transmit their secret messages to a remote receiver Diana by performing a series local operations on their respective particles according to the quadripartite stipulation. From Alice, Bob, Charlie and Diana's Bell measurement results, Diana can infer the secret messages. If a perfect quantum channel is used, the secret messages are faithfully transm…
In this article, we present the unbalanced quantum error correcting codes(one-party-QECC), a novel idea for correcting unbalanced quantum errors. In some quantum communication tasks using entangled pairs, the error distributions between two parts of the pairs are unbalanced, and. one party holds the whole entangled pairs at the final stage, and he or she is able to perform joint measurements on the pairs. In this situation the proposed one-party-QECC can improve error correction by allowing a higher tolerated error rate. We have established the general correspondence between linear classical c…
We study quantum protocols among two distrustful parties. By adopting a rather strict definition of correctness - guaranteeing that honest players obtain their correct outcomes only - we can show that every strictly correct quantum protocol implementing a non-trivial classical primitive necessarily leaks information to a dishonest player. This extends known impossibility results to all non-trivial primitives. We provide a framework for quantifying this leakage and argue that leakage is a good measure for the privacy provided to the players by a given protocol. Our framework also covers the cas…
In this paper, a three-party secure semiquantum summation protocol, which can calculate the modulo 2 addition of the private bits from one quantum participant and two classical participants, is constructed by only using single qubits as the initial quantum resource. This protocol needs none of quantum entanglement swapping, the unitary operation or a pre-shared private key. This protocol only requires the quantum participant to perform the Z basis measurements, the X basis measurements and the Bell basis measurements. Compared with the existing only semiquantum summation protocol (Int J Theor …
In this paper, we propose a two-party semiquantum summation protocol, where two classical users can accomplish the summation of their private binary sequences with the assistance of a quantum semi-honest third party (TP). The term 'semi-honest' implies that TP cannot conspire with others but is able to implement all kinds oof attacks. This protocol employs logical qubits as traveling particles to overcome the negative influence of collective-dephasing noise and needn't make any two parties pre-share a random secret key. The security analysis turns out that this protocol can effectively prevent…
A new commitment scheme based on position-verification and non-local quantum correlations is presented here for the first time in literature. The only credential for unconditional security is the position of committer and non-local correlations generated; neither receiver has any pre-shared data with the committer nor does receiver require trusted and authenticated quantum/classical channels between him and the committer. In the proposed scheme, receiver trusts the commitment only if the scheme itself verifies position of the committer and validates her commitment through non-local quantum cor…
We consider the task of secure multi-party distributed quantum computation on a quantum network. We propose a protocol based on quantum error correction which reduces the number of necessary qubits. That is, each of the $n$ nodes in our protocol requires an operational workspace of $n^2+Θ(s) n$ qubits, as opposed to previously shown $Ω\big((n^3+n^2s^2)\log n\big)$ qubits, where $s$ is a security parameter. To achieve universal computation, we develop a distributed procedure for verifying magic states based on magic state distillation and statistical testing of randomly selected states. This al…
We present attacks that show that unconditionally secure two-party classical computation is impossible for many classes of function. Our analysis applies to both quantum and relativistic protocols. We illustrate our results by showing the impossibility of oblivious transfer.
Weak coherent states as a photon source for quantum cryptography have limit in secure data rate and transmission distance because of the presence of multi-photon events and loss in transmission line. Two-photon events in a coherent state can be taken out by a two-photon interference scheme. We investigate the security issue of utilizing this modified coherent state in quantum cryptography. A 4 dB improvement in secure data rate or a nearly two-fold increase in transmission distance over the coherent state are found. With a recently proposed and improved encoding strategy, further improvement i…
Secure communication plays a crucial role in the Internet Age. Quantum mechanics may revolutionise cryptography as we know it today. In this Review Article, we introduce the motivation and the current state of the art of research in quantum cryptography. In particular, we discuss the present security model together with its assumptions, strengths and weaknesses. After a brief introduction to recent experimental progress and challenges, we survey the latest developments in quantum hacking and counter-measures against it.
Recently, a quantum multi-party summation protocol based on the quantum Fourier transform has been proposed [Quantum Inf Process 17: 129, 2018]. The protocol claims to be secure against both outside and participant attacks. However, a closer look reveals that the player in charge of generating the required multi-partite entangled states can launch two kinds of attacks to learn about other parties' private integer strings without being caught. In this paper, we present these attacks, and propose countermeasures to make the protocol secure again. The improved protocol not only can resist these a…
The quantum key distribution network with Vernam's One Time Pad encryption and secret sharing are powerful security tools to realize an information theoretically secure distributed storage system. In our previous work, a single-password-authenticated secret sharing scheme based on the QKD network and Shamir's secret sharing was experimentally demonstrated; it confirmed ITS data transmission, storage, authentication, and integrity. To achieve data integrity, an ITS message authentication code tag is employed and a data owner of the secret sharing performs both the MAC tag generation and verific…
In this paper, a lightweight three-user secure quantum summation protocol is put forward by using single-particle states, which can accomplish the goal that three users cooperate together to calculate the modulo 2 addition of their private messages without the help of a third party. This protocol only requires single-particle states rather than quantum entangled states as the initial quantum resource, and only needs single-particle measurements and Bell basis measurements. This protocol needs none of quantum entanglement swapping, the Pauli operations, the controlled-not (CNOT) operation, the …
Several attacks have been proposed on quantum key distribution systems with gated single-photon detectors. The attacks involve triggering the detectors outside the center of the detector gate, and/or using bright illumination to exploit classical photodiode mode of the detectors. Hence a secure detection scheme requires two features: The detection events must take place in the middle of the gate, and the detector must be single-photon sensitive. Here we present a technique called bit-mapped gating, which is an elegant way to force the detections in the middle of the detector gate by coupling d…
Bit commitment involves the submission of evidence from one party to another so that the evidence can be used to confirm a later revealed bit value by the first party, while the second party cannot determine the bit value from the evidence alone. It is widely believed that secure quantum bit commitment is impossible due to quantum entanglement cheating, which is codified in a general impossibility theorem. In this paper, the scope of this general impossibility proof is extended and analyzed, and gaps are found. Three specific protocols are described for which the entanglement cheating as given…
Since unconditionally secure quantum two-party computations are known to be impossible, most existing quantum private comparison (QPC) protocols adopted a third party. Recently, we proposed a QPC protocol which involves two parties only, and showed that although it is not unconditionally secure, it only leaks an extremely small amount of information to the other party. Here we further propose the device-independent version of the protocol, so that it can be more convenient and dependable in practical applications.
Here we propose a general relativistic quantum framework for cryptography that exploits the fascinating connection of quantum non-locality and special theory of relativity with cryptography. The underlying principle of unconditional security is causality and two-fold quantum non-local correlations: first entanglement swapping and then teleportation over causally independent entangled systems. We show that the proposed framework has following remarkable and novel features in mistrustful cryptography: (i) It helps in defining a new notion of oblivious transfer where both the data transferred and…
Methods of quantum mechanics promise information-theoretic security for various protocols in cryptography. However, impossibility of some cryptographic applications such as standard bit commitment, oblivious transfer, multiparty secure computations and ideal coin tossing in quantum regime leaves an obvious question on the completeness of quantum cryptography. Instead of using wide range of rules and techniques for a variety of cryptographic applications, we demonstrate here a unified structure for quantum cryptography based on quantum non-local correlations. The unified framework achieves same…
We analyse the distribution of secure keys using quantum cryptography based on the continuous variable degree of freedom of entangled photon pairs. We derive the information capacity of a scheme based on the spatial entanglement of photons from a realistic source, and show that the standard measures of security known for quadrature-based continuous variable quantum cryptography (CV-QKD) are inadequate. A specific simple eavesdropping attack is analysed to illuminate how secret information may be distilled well beyond the bounds of the usual CV-QKD measures.
The promise of secure cryptographic quantum key distribution schemes is based on the use of quantum effects in the spin space. We point out that in fact in many current quantum cryptography protocols the space part of the wave function is neglected. However exactly the space part of the wave function describes the behaviour of particles in ordinary real three-dimensional space. As a result such schemes can be secure against eavesdropping attacks in the abstract spin space but could be insecure in the real three-dimensional space. We discuss an approach to the security of quantum key distributi…
We prove that the teleportation based quantum cryptography protocol presented in [Opt. Commun. 283, 184 (2010)], which is built using only orthogonal states encoding the classical bits that are teleported from Alice to Bob, is asymptotically secure against all types of individual and collective attacks. We then investigate modifications to that protocol leading to greater secret-key rates and to security against coherent attacks. In other words, we show an unconditional secure quantum key distribution protocol that does not need non-orthogonal quantum states to encode the bits of the secret ke…
Secure multi-party quantum computation (MPQC) protocol is a versatile tool that enables error-free distributed quantum computation to a group of $n$ mutually distrustful quantum nodes even when some of the quantum nodes do not follow the instructions of the protocol honestly. However, in case of the MPQC protocols built on top of the quantum error correction technique, the versatility is significantly affected by the fact that one has to choose a particular quantum error-correcting code (QECC), which immediately applies a constraint on the number of quantum nodes $n$. Therefore, in this talk, …
A set of schemes for secure quantum communication are analyzed under the influence of non-Markovian channels. By comparing with the corresponding Markovian cases, it is seen that the average fidelity in all these schemes can be maintained for relatively longer periods of time. The effects of non-Markovian noise on a number of facets of quantum cryptography, such as quantum secure direct communication, deterministic secure quantum communication and their controlled counterparts, quantum dialogue, quantum key distribution, quantum key agreement, etc., have been extensively investigated. Specific…
A significant branch of classical cryptography deals with the problems which arise when mistrustful parties need to generate, process or exchange information. As Kilian showed a while ago, mistrustful classical cryptography can be founded on a single protocol, oblivious transfer, from which general secure multi-party computations can be built. The scope of mistrustful quantum cryptography is limited by no-go theorems, which rule out, inter alia, unconditionally secure quantum protocols for oblivious transfer or general secure two-party computations. These theorems apply even to protocols which…
Quantum conference is a process of securely exchanging messages between three or more parties, using quantum resources. A Measurement Device Independent Quantum Dialogue (MDI-QD) protocol, which is secure against information leakage, has been proposed (Quantum Information Processing 16.12 (2017): 305) in 2017, is proven to be insecure against intercept-and-resend attack strategy. We first modify this protocol and generalize this MDI-QD to a three-party quantum conference and then to a multi-party quantum conference. We also propose a protocol for quantum multi-party XOR computation. None of th…
Cryptanalysis is an important branch in the study of cryptography, including both the classical cryptography and the quantum one. In this paper we analyze the security of two three-party quantum key distribution protocols (QKDPs) proposed recently, and point out that they are susceptible to a simple and effective attack, i.e. the dense-coding attack. It is shown that the eavesdropper Eve can totally obtain the session key by sending entangled qubits as the fake signal to Alice and performing collective measurements after Alice's encoding. The attack process is just like a dense-coding communic…
The Universal Composability model (UC) by Canetti (FOCS 2001) allows for secure composition of arbitrary protocols. We present a quantum version of the UC model which enjoys the same compositionality guarantees. We prove that in this model statistically secure oblivious transfer protocols can be constructed from commitments. Furthermore, we show that every statistically classically UC secure protocol is also statistically quantum UC secure. Such implications are not known for other quantum security definitions. As a corollary, we get that quantum UC secure protocols for general multi-party com…
To construct a quantum network with many end users, it is critical to have a cost-efficient way to distribute entanglement over different network ends. We demonstrate an entanglement access network, where the expensive resource, the entangled photon source at the telecom wavelength and the core communication channel, is shared by many end users. Using this cost-efficient entanglement access network, we report experimental demonstration of a secure multiparty computation protocol, the privacy-preserving secure sum problem, based on the network quantum cryptography.
Secure multi-party computation (SMPC) protocols allow several parties that distrust each other to collectively compute a function on their inputs. In this paper, we introduce a protocol that lifts classical SMPC to quantum SMPC in a composably and statistically secure way, even for a single honest party. Unlike previous quantum SMPC protocols, our proposal only requires very limited quantum resources from all but one party; it suffices that the weak parties, i.e. the clients, are able to prepare single-qubit states in the X-Y plane. The novel quantum SMPC protocol is constructed in a naturally…
Since the negative result of Lo (Physical Review A, 1997), it has been left open whether there exist some functions that can be securely computed in two-party setting in quantum domain when one of the parties is malicious. In this paper, we for the first time, show that there are some functions for which secure two-party quantum computation is indeed possible for non-simultaneous channel model. This is in sharp contrast with the impossibility result of Ben -Or et al. (FOCS, 2006) in broadcast channel model. The functions we study are of two types - one is any function without an embedded XOR, …
The cryptographic task of secure multi-party (classical) computation has received a lot of attention in the last decades. Even in the extreme case where a computation is performed between $k$ mutually distrustful players, and security is required even for the single honest player if all other players are colluding adversaries, secure protocols are known. For quantum computation, on the other hand, protocols allowing arbitrary dishonest majority have only been proven for $k=2$. In this work, we generalize the approach taken by Dupuis, Nielsen and Salvail (CRYPTO 2012) in the two-party setting t…
