We introduce two dual, purely quantum protocols: for entanglement distillation assisted by quantum communication (``mother'' protocol) and for entanglement assisted quantum communication (``father'' protocol). We show how a large class of ``children'' protocols (including many previously known ones) can be derived from the two by direct application of teleportation or super-dense coding. Furthermore, the parent may be recovered from most of the children protocols by making them ``coherent''. We also summarize the various resource trade-offs these protocols give rise to.
Each classical public-coin protocol for coin flipping is naturally associated with a quantum protocol for weak coin flipping. The quantum protocol is obtained by replacing classical randomness with quantum entanglement and by adding a cheat detection test in the last round that verifies the integrity of this entanglement. The set of such protocols defines a family which contains the protocol with bias 0.192 previously found by the author, as well as protocols with bias as low as 1/6 described herein. The family is analyzed by identifying a set of optimal protocols for every number of messages.…
We present a family of loss-tolerant quantum strong coin flipping protocols; each protocol differing in the number of qubits employed. For a single qubit we obtain a bias of 0.4, reproducing the result of Berlín et al. [Phys. Rev. A 80, 062321 (2009)], while for two qubits we obtain a bias of 0.3975. Numerical evidence based on semi-definite programming indicates that the bias continues to decrease as the number of qubits is increased but at a rapidly decreasing rate.
We give a simple, direct proof of the "mother" protocol of quantum information theory. In this new formulation, it is easy to see that the mother, or rather her generalization to the fully quantum Slepian-Wolf protocol, simultaneously accomplishes two goals: quantum communication-assisted entanglement distillation, and state transfer from the sender to the receiver. As a result, in addition to her other "children," the mother protocol generates the state merging primitive of Horodecki, Oppenheim and Winter, a fully quantum reverse Shannon theorem, and a new class of distributed compression pro…
We establish bounds on the maximum entanglement gain and minimum quantum communication cost of the Fully Quantum Slepian-Wolf protocol in the one-shot regime, which is considered to be at the apex of the existing family tree in Quantum Information Theory. These quantities, which are expressed in terms of smooth min- and max-entropies, reduce to the known rates of quantum communication cost and entanglement gain in the asymptotic i.i.d. scenario. We also provide an explicit proof of the optimality of these asymptotic rates. We introduce a resource inequality for the one-shot FQSW protocol, whic…
Quantum inspired protocols e.g. [AAV13,AG17] attempt to achieve a single-prover interactive protocol where a classical machine can verify quantum computations in an information-theoretically secure manner. We define a family of protocols which seem natural for verifying quantum computations and generalizes such known protocols, namely those of [AAV13,AG17]. We show that any protocol from this family is bound to require an extremely powerful prover, much like the classical protocols of [LFKN92] and [Sha92]. Using our analysis, we also hint at possible ways one might try to realize a protocol wh…
We present a family of entanglement purification protocols that generalize four previous methods, namely the recurrence method, the modified recurrence method, and the two methods proposed by Maneva-Smolin and Leung-Shor. We will show that this family of protocols have improved yields over a wide range of initial fidelities F, and hence imply new lower bounds on the quantum capacity assisted by two-way classical communication of the quantum depolarizing channel. In particular, the yields of these protocols are higher than the yield of universal hashing for F less than 0.993 and as F goes to 1.
The original two-way continuous-variable quantum-key-distribution (CV QKD) protocols [S. Pirandola, S. Mancini, S. Lloyd, and S. L. Braunstein, Nature Physics 4, 726 (2008)] give the security against the collective attack on the condition of the tomography of the quantum channels. We propose a family of new two-way CV QKD protocols and prove their security against collective entangling cloner attacks without the tomography of the quantum channels. The simulation result indicates that the new protocols maintain the same advantage as the original two-way protocols whose tolerable excess noise su…
Recently we proposed a family of magic state distillation protocols that obtains asymptotic performance that is conjectured to be optimal. This family depends upon several codes, called "inner codes" and "outer codes." We presented some small examples of these codes as well as an analysis of codes in the asymptotic limit. Here, we analyze such protocols in an intermediate size regime, using hundreds to thousands of qubits. We use BCH inner codes, combined with various outer codes. We extend our protocols by adding error correction in some cases. We present a variety of protocols in various inp…
Zero-knowledge proof system is an important protocol that can be used as a basic block for construction of other more complex cryptographic protocols. Quantum zero-knowledge protocols have been proposed but, since their implementation requires advanced quantum technology devices, experimental implementation of zero-knowledge protocols have not being reported. In this work, we present a quantum zero-knowledge protocol based on a quantum bit commitment protocol that can be implemented with today technology. Hence, our quantum zero-knowledge protocol can be readily implemented.
Self-tested quantum information processing provides a means for doing useful information processing with untrusted quantum apparatus. Previous work was limited to performing computations and protocols in real Hilbert spaces, which is not a serious obstacle if one is only interested in final measurement statistics being correct (for example, getting the correct factors of a large number after running Shor's factoring algorithm). This limitation was shown by McKague et al. to be fundamental, since there is no way to experimentally distinguish any quantum experiment from a special simulation usin…
A theoretical framework of quantum no-key (QNK) protocol has been presented. As its applications, we develop three kinds of QNK protocols: the practical QNK protocols, the QNK protocol based on quantum perfect encryption, and the QNK protocols based on Boolean function computing. The security of these protocols is based on the laws of quantum mechanics, other than computational hypothesis.
A theorem is proved which states that no classical key generating protocol could ever be provably secure. Consequently, candidates for provably secure protocols must rely on some quantum effect. Theorem relies on the fact that BB84 Quantum key distribution protocol has been proven secure.
We propose a W state-based protocol for anonymously transmitting quantum messages in a quantum network. Different from the existing protocols [A. Unnikrishnan, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 240501 (2019)], the proposed protocol can be effectively implemented in the network only equipped with quantum channels and regular broadcast channels. Throughout the design procedure, we develop three sub-protocols using the W state, including the quantum collision detection protocol and the quantum notification protocol. Moreover, together with the conventional anonymous entanglement protocol, the whole a…
Quantum key distribution protocols constitute an important part of quantum cryptography, where the security of sensitive information arises from the laws of physics. In this paper we introduce a new family of key distribution protocols and we compare its key with the well-known protocols such as BB84, PBC0 and generation rate to the well-known protocols such as BB84, PBC0 and R04. We also state the security analysis of these protocols based on the entanglement distillation and CSS codes techniques.
Quantum protocols for bit commitment have been proposed and it is largely accepted that unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment is not possible; however, it can be more secure than classical bit commitment. In despite of its usefulness, quantum bit commitment protocols have not been experimentally implemented. The main reason is the fact that all proposed quantum bit commitment protocols require quantum memory. In this work, we show a quantum bit commitment protocol that does not require quantum memory and can be implemented with present technology.
We present a quantum no-key protocol for direct and secure transmission of quantum and classical messages based on simple Boolean function computation with several quantum gates and Shamir's interactive idea of classical message encryption. This protocol has inherent personal identification and message authentication. It probably is the first quantum protocol that can resist the man-in-the-middle attack by itself.
Inspired by the semi-quantum protocols, this paper defines the lightweight quantum security protocols, in which lightweight participants can only operate two out of four very lightweight quantum operations. Subsequently, this study proposes a Lightweight Mediated Quantum Key Distribution (LMQKD) protocol as an example to disclose the feasibility and advantage of the lightweight quantum protocol. In the proposed protocol, a dishonest third party (TP) with complete quantum capabilities helps two lightweight quantum users establish a secure key. The lightweight quantum users are allowed to perfor…
In this letter, we proposed a quantum authentication protocol. The authentication process is implemented by the symmetric cryptographic scheme with quantum effects.
The unique features of quantum walk, such as the possibility of the walker to be in superposition ofthe position space and get entangled with the position space, provides inherent advantages that canbe captured to design highly secure quantum communication protocols. Here we propose two quan-tum direct communication protocols, a Quantum Secure Direct Communication (QSDC) protocoland a Controlled Quantum Dialogue (CQD) protocol using discrete-time quantum walk on a cycle.The proposed protocols are unconditionally secure against various attacks such as the intercept-resend attack, the denial of …
We propose a quantum key distribution protocol with quantum based user authentication. Our protocol is the first one in which users can authenticate each other without previously shared secret and then securely distribute a key where the key may not be exposed to even a trusted third party. The security of our protocol is guaranteed by the properties of the entanglement.
We propose a protocol of remote implementations of quantum operations by hybridizing bidirectional quantum state teleportation's (BQST) and Wang's one. The protocol is available for remote implemetations of quantum operations in the restricted sets specified in Sec. III. We also give the proof of the protocol and point out its optimization. As an extension, this hybrid protocol can be reduced to BQST and Wang protocols.
We present a new approach to simulate quantum cryptography protocols using event-based processes. The method is validated by simulating the BB84 protocol and the Ekert protocol, both without and with the presence of an eavesdropper.
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…
Two orthogonal-state-based protocols of quantum key agreement (QKA) are proposed. The first protocol of QKA proposed here is designed for two-party QKA, whereas the second protocol is designed for multi-party QKA. Security of these orthogonal-state-based protocols arise from monogamy of entanglement. This is in contrast to the existing protocols of QKA where security arises from the use of non-orthogonal state (non-commutativity principle). Further, it is shown that all the quantum systems that are useful for implementation of quantum dialogue and most of the protocols of secure direct quantum…
This paper is withdrawn. We study the quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol based on a quantum retrodiction protocol, namely the so-called mean king problem. The security is analyzed by considering the eavesdropping on both the preparation of the entangled pair and the transmission of the quantum state. This QKD protocol can generate efficiently a bit of raw key in every single run. We find that, for qubit system, it is more secure than the QKD Bennett-Brassard 1984 protocol and the six-state protocol. This QKD protocol works also for higher dimensional system.
This article describes a quantum bit commitment protocol, QBC1, based on entanglement destruction via forced measurements and proves its unconditional security.
A quantum protocol for bit commitment the security of which is based on technological limitations on nondemolition measurements and long-term quantum memory is presented.
Generalizing the notion of dynamic quantum secret sharing (DQSS), a simplified protocol for hierarchical dynamic quantum secret sharing (HDQSS) is proposed and it is shown that the protocol can be implemented using any existing protocol of quantum key distribution, quantum key agreement or secure direct quantum communication. The security of this proposed protocol against eavesdropping and collusion attacks is discussed with specific attention towards the issues related to the composability of the subprotocols that constitute the proposed protocol. The security and qubit efficiency of the prop…
We propose a new class of quantum key distribution protocol, that ended up to be robust against photon number splitting attacks in the weak laser pulse implementations. This protocol comprises of BB84 protocol and SARG protocol, especially in aspects of controlling classical sifting procedures of two protocols. The protocol is more secure than both of BB84 protocol and SARG protocol, and the ultimate limit of robustness in the proposed protocol expands as well than both of them.
In this paper, we present a semi-loss-tolerant strong quantum coin-flipping (QCF) protocol with the best bias of 0.3536. Our manuscript applies Quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement to quantum coin-flipping protocol. Furthermore, a single photon as a single qubit is used to avoid the difficult implementation of EPR resources. We also analyze the security of our protocol obtaining the best result among all coin-flipping protocols considering loss. A semi-loss-tolerant Quantum Dice Rolling (QDR) protocol is first proposed, and the security of corresponding three-party QDR is analyzed to bette…
Because quantum computers are expensive, it is envisaged that individuals who want to utilize them would do so by delegating their calculations to someone who has a quantum computer. When quantum computer users delegate computations to quantum servers, they wish to keep information about their calculations hidden from the servers. The protocol of delegating a calculation while hiding information about the calculation from the server is called {\sl blind quantum computation protocol}. Prior research on single-server's blind quantum computation protocol required users to have quantum capabilitie…
A family of protocols for quantum weak coin-flipping which asymptotically achieve a bias of 0.192 is described in this paper. The family contains protocols with n+2 messages for all n>1. The case n=2 is equivalent to the protocol of Spekkens and Rudolph with bias of 0.207. The case n=3 achieves a bias of 0.199, and n=8 achieves a bias of 0.193. The analysis of the protocols uses Kitaev's description of coin-flipping as a semidefinite program. The paper constructs an analytical solution to the dual problem which provides an upper bound on the amount that a party can cheat.
Recently, Hassanpour and Houshmand have proposed a protocol of controlled deterministic secure quantum communication (Quant. Info. Process, DOI 10.1007/s11128-014-0866-z (2014)). The authors compared the efficiency of their protocol with that of two other existing protocols and claimed that their protocol is efficient. Here, we have shown that the efficiency of Hassanpour Houshmand (HH) protocol is not high, and there exist several approaches through which more efficient protocols for the same task can be designed. To establish this point, we have proposed an efficient protocol of controlled d…
We consider a quantum key expansion (QKE) protocol based on entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs). In these protocols, a seed of a previously shared secret key is used in the post-processing stage of a standard quantum key distribution protocol like the Bennett-Brassard 1984 protocol, in order to produce a larger secret key. This protocol was proposed by Luo and Devetak, but codes leading to good performance have not been investigated. We look into a family of EAQECCs generated by classical finite geometry (FG) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, for which very effi…
In this work, we propose a quantum bit string commitment protocol using polarization of mesoscopic coherent states. The protocol is described and its security against brute force and quantum cloning machine attack is analyzed.
We propose an easy implementable prepare-and-measure protocol for robust quantum key distribution with photon polarization. The protocol is fault tolerant against collective random unitary channel noise. The protocol does not need any collective quantum measurement or quantum memory. A security proof and a specific linear optical realization using spontaneous parametric down conversion are given.
The security of quantum key distribution protocols hinges upon features of physical systems that are uniquely quantum in nature. We explore the role of quantumness as qualified by quantum contextuality, in quantum key distribution schemes. We present a new quantum key distribution protocol whose security depends uponthe KCBS inequality and contextuality monogamy. We explicitly calculate the key rate, error rate introduced between Alice-Bob communication due to the presence of Eve, and the information-gain by Eve. This protocol provides a new framework for quantum key distribution which has con…
We suggest an attack on a symmetric non-ideal quantum coin-tossing protocol suggested by Mayers Salvail and Chiba-Kohno. The analysis of the attack shows that the protocol is insecure.
We prove the security of a high-capacity quantum key distribution protocol over noisy channels. By using entanglement purification protocol, we construct a modified version of the protocol in which we separate it into two consecutive stages. We prove their securities respectively and hence the security of the whole protocol.
Shannon presented the concept `unicity distance' for describing the security of secret key encryption protocols against various ciphertext-only attacks. We develop this important concept of cryptanalysis into the quantum context, and find that there exist quantum encryption protocols reusing a short key have infinite unicity distance.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) has been developed for decades and several different QKD protocols have been proposed. But two difficulties limit the implementation of most QKD protocols. First, the involved participants are required to have heavy quantum capabilities, such as quantum joint operation, quantum register, and so on. Second, a hypothetical authenticated classical channel is used in most of the existing QKD protocols and this assumed channel does not exist in reality. To solve both the above limitations at the same time, this study proposes three lightweight authenticated QKD protoc…
Semi-quantum key distribution protocols are designed to allow two users to establish a secure secret key when one of the two users is limited to performing certain "classical" operations. There have been several such protocols developed recently, however, due to their reliance on a two-way quantum communication channel (and thus, the attacker's opportunity to interact with the qubit twice), their security analysis is difficult and little is known concerning how secure they are compared to their fully quantum counterparts. In this paper we prove the unconditional security of a particular semi-q…
This study presents the first semi-quantum private comparison protocol under an almost-dishonest third party. The proposed protocol allows two classical participants to compare their secret information without compromising it's privacy. The security analyses indicate that the protocol is free from several well-known attacks.
We provide a quantum key distribution protocol based on the correlations of the Greenburger-Horne-Zeilinger(GHZ) state. No classical communication is needed in the process of the establishment of the key. Our protocol is useful when an unjammable classical communication channel is unavailable. We prove that the protocol is secure.
We discuss long code problems in the Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) quantum key distribution protocol and describe how they can be overcome by concatenation of the protocol. Observing that concatenated modified Lo-Chau protocol finally reduces to the concatenated BB84 protocol, we give the unconditional security of the concatenated BB84 protocol.
In all existing protocols of private communication with encryption and decryption, the pre-shared key can be used for only one time. We give a deterministic quantum key expansion protocol where the pre-shared key can be recycled. Our protocol is exponentially secure. Our protocol costs less qubits and almost zero classical communications with authentication steps being included. Since our protocol can distribute the deterministic bits, it can also be used for direct communication.
Quantum network protocols offer new functionalities such as enhanced security to communication and computational systems. Despite the rapid progress in quantum hardware, it has not yet reached a level of maturity that enables execution of many quantum protocols in practical settings. To develop quantum protocols in real world, it is necessary to examine their performance considering the imperfections in their practical implementation using simulation platforms. In this paper, we consider several quantum protocols that enable promising functionalities and services in near-future quantum network…
We present a simple protocol for certifying graph states in quantum networks using stabiliser measurements. The certification statements can easily be applied to different protocols using graph states. We see for example how it can be used to for measurement based verified quantum compu- tation, certified sampling of random unitaries and quantum metrology and sharing quantum secrets over untrusted channels.
Lin et al. [S. Lin, F. Gao, Q.-y. Wen, F.-c. Zhu, Opt. Commun. 281 (2008) 4553] pointed that the multiparty quantum secret sharing protocol [Z.-j. Zhang, G. Gao, X. Wang, L.-f. Han, S.-h. Shi, Opt. Commun. 269 (2007) 418] is insecure and proposed an improved three-party quantum secret sharing protocol. In this paper, we study the security of the improved three-party quantum secret sharing protocol and find that it is still insecure. Finally, a further improved three-party quantum secret sharing protocol is proposed.
We show that replacing the usual sifting step of the standard quantum-key-distribution protocol BB84 by a one-way reverse reconciliation procedure increases its robustness against photon-number-splitting (PNS) attacks to the level of the SARG04 protocol while keeping the raw key-rate of BB84. This protocol, which uses the same state and detection than BB84, is the m=4 member of a protocol-family using m polarization states which we introduce here. We show that the robustness of these protocols against PNS attacks increases exponentially with m, and that the effective keyrate of optimized weak …
In this paper, we propose a quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol based on only a two-dimensional Hilbert space encoding a quantum system and independent devices between the equipment for state preparation and measurement. Our protocol is inspired by the fully device-independent quantum key distribution (FDI-QKD) protocol and the measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) protocol. Our protocol only requires the state to be prepared in the two dimensional Hilbert space, which weakens the state preparation assumption in the original MDI-QKD protocol. More interestingly,…
We propose a practical quantum oblivious transfer and a bit commitment protocols which replace the single-photon source with weak coherent pulses and allow error and loss in channel and detectors. These protocols can be realized with available optoelectronic apparatus.
The proposed eavesdropping scheme reveals that the quantum communication protocol recently presented by Bostrom and Felbinger [Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 187902 (2002)] is not secure as far as quantum channel losses are taken into account.
