We present a protocol for quantum cryptographic network consisting of a quantum network center and many users, in which any pair of parties with members chosen from the whole users on request can secure a quantum key distribution by help of the center. The protocol is based on the quantum authentication scheme given by Barnum et al. [Proc. 43rd IEEE Symp. FOCS'02, p. 449 (2002)]. We show that exploiting the quantum authentication scheme the center can safely make two parties share nearly perfect entangled states used in the quantum key distribution. This implies that the quantum cryptographic network protocol is secure against all kinds of eavesdropping.
Standard quantum cryptographic protocols are not secure if one assumes that nonlocal hidden variables exist and can be measured with arbitrary precision. The security can be restored if one of the communicating parties randomly switches between two standard protocols.
This paper consists of musings that originate mainly from conversations with other physicists, as together we've tried to learn some cryptography, but also from conversations with a couple of classical cryptographers. The main thrust of the paper is an attempt to explore the ramifications for cryptographic security of incorporating physics into our thinking at every level. I begin by discussing two fundamental cryptographic principles, namely that security must not rely on secrecy of the protocol and that our local environment must be secure, from a physical perspective. I go on to explain why…
This work is the development and analysis of the recently proposed quantum cryptographic protocol, based on the use of the two-mode coherently correlated states. The protocol is supplied with the cryptographic control procedures. The quantum noise influence on the channel error properties is examined. State detection features are proposed.
Quantum correlations between two particles show non-classical properties which can be used for providing secure transmission of information. We present a quantum cryptographic system, in which users store particles in quantum memories kept in a transmission center. Correlations between the particles stored by two users are created upon request by projecting their product state onto a fully entangled state. Our system allows for secure communication between any pair of users who have particles in the same center. Unlike other quantum cryptographic systems, it can work without quantum channels a…
It is proven that recently introduced states with perfectly secure bits of cryptographic key (private states representing secure bit) [K. Horodecki et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 160502 (2005)] as well as its multipartite and higher dimension generalizations always represent distillable entanglement. The corresponding lower bounds on distillable entanglement are provided. We also present a simple alternative proof that for any bipartite quantum state entanglement cost is an upper bound on distillable cryptographic key in bipartite scenario.
Besides achieving secure communication between two spatially-separated parties, another important issue in modern cryptography is related to secure communication in time, i.e., the possibility to confidentially store information on a memory for later retrieval. Here we explore this possibility in the setting of quantum reading, which exploits quantum entanglement to efficiently read data from a memory whereas classical strategies (e.g., based on coherent states or their mixtures) cannot retrieve any information. From this point of view, the technique of quantum reading can provide a new form o…
Cryptographic hash functions are fundamental primitives widely used in practice. For such a function $f:\{0, 1\}^n\to\{0, 1\}^m$, it is nearly impossible for an adversary to produce the hash $f(x)$ without knowing the secret message $x\in\{0, 1\}^n$. Unfortunately, all hash functions are vulnerable under the side-channel attack, which is a grave concern for information security in practice. This is because typically $m\ll n$ and an adversary needs only $m$ bits of information to pass the verification test. In sharp contrast, we show that when quantum states are used, the leakage allowed can be…
We show that the Csiszar-Korner sufficient condition for secure cryptographic key generation with the help of quantum theory can be easily derived using the triangle inequality for an information-theoretic distance.
We show that monogamy of Bell's inequality violations, which is strictly weaker condition than no-signaling is enough to prove security of quantum key distribution. We derive our results for a whole class of monogamy constraints and generalize our results to any theory that communicating parties may have access to. Some of these theories do not respect no-signaling principle yet still allow for secure communication. This proves that no-signaling is only a sufficient condition for the possibility of secure communication, but not the necessary one. We also present some new qualitative results co…
The commitment of bits between two mutually distrustful parties is a powerful cryptographic primitive with which many cryptographic objectives can be achieved. It is widely believed that unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment is impossible due to quantum entanglement cheating, which is codified in a general impossibility theorem. Gaps in the proof of this impossibility theorem are found. An unconditionally secure bit commitment protocol utilizing anonymous quantum states and the no-clone theorem is presented below with a full security proof.
Randomness is a vital resource for modern day information processing, especially for cryptography. A wide range of applications critically rely on abundant, high quality random numbers generated securely. Here we show how to expand a random seed at an exponential rate without trusting the underlying quantum devices. Our approach is secure against the most general adversaries, and has the following new features: cryptographic level of security, tolerating a constant level of imprecision in the devices, requiring only a unit size quantum memory per device component for the honest implementation,…
In majority of protocols of secure quantum communication (such as, BB84, B92, etc.), the unconditional security of the protocols are obtained by using conjugate coding (two or more mutually unbiased bases). Initially all the conjugate-coding-based protocols of secure quantum communication were restricted to quantum key distribution (QKD), but later on they were extended to other cryptographic tasks (such as, secure direct quantum communication and quantum key agreement). In contrast to the conjugate-coding-based protocols, a few completely orthogonal-state-based protocols of unconditionally se…
Cryptographic protocols, such as protocols for secure function evaluation (SFE), have played a crucial role in the development of modern cryptography. The extensive theory of these protocols, however, deals almost exclusively with classical attackers. If we accept that quantum information processing is the most realistic model of physically feasible computation, then we must ask: what classical protocols remain secure against quantum attackers? Our main contribution is showing the existence of classical two-party protocols for the secure evaluation of any polynomial-time function under reasona…
Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic task that guarantees a secure commitment between two mutually mistrustful parties and is a building block for many cryptographic primitives, including coin tossing, zero-knowledge proofs, oblivious transfer and secure two-party computation. Unconditionally secure bit commitment was thought to be impossible until recent theoretical protocols that combine quantum mechanics and relativity were shown to elude previous impossibility proofs. Here we implement such a bit commitment protocol. In the experiment, the committer performs quantum measurements u…
We develop a general framework for parameter estimation that allows only trusted parties to access the result and achieves optimal precision. The protocols are designed such that adversaries can access some information indeterministically, but only at the risk of getting caught (cheat-sensitivity); under the assumption that the adversary can access the channel only once, then the protocol is unconditionally secure. By combining techniques from quantum cryptography and quantum metrology, we devise cryptographic procedures for single parameter estimation when an arbitrary number of parties are i…
We propose a wide class of distillation schemes for multi-partite entangled states that are CSS-states. Our proposal provides not only superior efficiency, but also new insights on the connection between CSS-states and bipartite graph states. We then apply our distillation schemes to the tri-partite case for three cryptographic tasks--namely, (a) conference key agreement, (b) quantum sharing of classical secrets and (c) third-man cryptography. Moreover, we construct ``prepare-and-measure'' protocols for the above three cryptographic tasks which can be implemented with the generation of only a …
The importance of quantum key distribution as a cryptographic method depends upon its purported strong security guarantee. The following gives reasons on why such strong security guarantee has not been validly established and why good QKD security is difficult to obtain.
Formulating cryptographic definitions to protect against software piracy is an important research direction that has not received much attention. Since natural definitions using classical cryptography are impossible to achieve (as classical programs can always be copied), this directs us towards using techniques from quantum computing. The seminal work of Aaronson [CCC'09] introduced the notion of quantum copy-protection precisely to address the problem of software anti-piracy. However, despite being one of the most important problems in quantum cryptography, there are no provably secure solut…
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 demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that secure communication using intermediate-energy (mesoscopic) coherent states is possible. Our scheme is different from previous quantum cryptographic schemes in that a short secret key is explicitly used and in which quantum noise hides both the bit and the key. This encryption scheme can be optically amplified. New avenues are open to secure communications at high speeds in fiber-optic or free-space channels.
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…
Error mitigation is one of the key challenges in realising the full potential of quantum cryptographic protocols. Consequently, there is a lot of interest in adapting techniques from quantum error correction (QEC) to improve the robustness of quantum cryptographic protocols. In this work, we benchmark the performance of different QKD protocols on noisy quantum devices, with and without error correction. We obtain the secure key rates of BB84, B92 and BBM92 QKD protocols over a quantum channel that is subject to amplitude-damping noise. We demonstrate, theoretically and via implementations on t…
This work is intended as an introduction to cryptographic security and a motivation for the widely used Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) security definition. We review the notion of security necessary for a protocol to be usable in a larger cryptographic context, i.e., for it to remain secure when composed with other secure protocols. We then derive the corresponding security criterion for QKD. We provide several examples of QKD composed in sequence and parallel with different cryptographic schemes to illustrate how the error of a composed protocol is the sum of the errors of the individual prot…
We propose a protocol for deterministic communication that does not make use of entanglement. It exploits nonorthogonal states in a two-way quantum channel attaining significant improvement of security and efficiency over already known cryptographic protocols. The presented scheme, being deterministic, can be devoted to direct communication as well as to key distribution, and its experimental realization is feasible with present day technology.
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 propose a multiparty quantum cryptographic protocol. Unitary operators applied by Bob and Charlie, on their respective qubits of a tripartite entangled state encodes a classical symbol that can be decoded at Alice's end with the help of a decoding matrix. Eve's presence can be detected by the disturbance of the decoding matrix. Our protocol is secure against intercept-resend attacks. Furthermore, it is efficient and deterministic in the sense that two classical bits can be transferred per entangled pair of qubits. It is worth mentioning that in this protocol same symbol can be used for key …
We provide a class of bound entangled states that have positive distillable secure key rate. The smallest state of this kind is $4 \otimes 4$, which shows that peculiar security contained in bound entangled states does not need high dimensional systems. We show, that for these states a positive key rate can be obtained by {\it one-way} Devetak-Winter protocol. Subsequently the volume of bound entangled key-distillable states in arbitrary dimension is shown to be nonzero. We provide a scheme of verification of cryptographic quality of experimentally prepared state in terms of local observables.…
The commodity-based cryptography is an alternative approach to realize conventionally impossible cryptographic primitives such as unconditionally secure bit-commitment by consuming pre-established correlation between distrustful participants. A unit of such classical correlation is known as the one-time table (OTT). In this paper, we introduce a new example besides quantum key distribution in which quantum correlation is useful for cryptography. We propose a scheme for unconditionally secure qubit-commitment, a quantum cryptographic primitive forbidden by the recently proven no-masking theorem…
We investigate a fundamental property of device independent security in quantum cryptography by characterizing probability distributions which are necessarily independent of the measurement results of any eavesdropper. We show that probability distributions that are secure in this sense are exactly the extremal quantum probability distributions. This allows us to give a characterization of security in algebraic terms. We apply the method to common examples for two-party as well as multi-party setups and present a scheme for verifying security of probability distributions with two parties, two …
Secure cryptographic protocols are indispensable for modern communication systems. It is realized through an encryption process in cryptography. In quantum cryptography, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a widely popular quantum communication scheme that enables two parties to establish a shared secret key that can be used to encrypt and decrypt messages. But security loopholes still exist in this cryptographic protocol, as an eavesdropper can in principle still intercept all the ciphertext to perform cryptanalysis and the key may get leaked to the eavesdropper, although it happens very rarely…
A cryptographic algorithm is proposed based on fully quantum mechanical keys and ciphers. Encryption and decryption are carried out via an appropriate measurement process on entangled states as governed by a quantum mechanical, asymmetrical and dynamical public key distribution. The use of public keys leads to a high availability of our scheme, while their quantum nature is shown to ensure unconditional security of the proposed algorithm.
Spacetime-constrained oblivious transfer (SCOT) extends the fundamental primitive of oblivious transfer to Minkowski space. SCOT and location oblivious data transfer (LODT) are the only known cryptographic tasks with classical inputs and outputs for which unconditional security needs both quantum theory and relativity. We give an unconditionally secure SCOT protocol that, contrasting previous SCOT and LODT protocols, is practical to implement with current technology, where distant agents need only communicate classical information, while quantum communication occurs at a single location. We al…
Secure software leasing is a quantum cryptographic primitive that enables us to lease software to a user by encoding it into a quantum state. Secure software leasing has a mechanism that verifies whether a returned software is valid or not. The security notion guarantees that once a user returns a software in a valid form, the user no longer uses the software. In this work, we introduce the notion of secret-key functional encryption (SKFE) with secure key leasing, where a decryption key can be securely leased in the sense of secure software leasing. We also instantiate it with standard cryptog…
By analogy to classical cryptography, we develop a "quantum public key" based cryptographic scheme in which the two public and private keys consist in each of two entangled beams of squeezed light. An analog message is encrypted by modulating the phase of the beam sent in public. The knowledge of the degree of non classical correlation between the beam quadratures measured in private and in public allows only the receiver to decrypt the message. Finally, in a view towards absolute security, we formally prove that any external intervention of an eavesdropper makes him vulnerable to any subseque…
Several quantum cryptographic schemes have been proposed and realized experimentally in the past. However, even with an advancement in quantum technology and escalated interest in the designing of direct secure quantum communication schemes there are not many experimental implementations of these cryptographic schemes. In this paper, we have provided a set of optical circuits for such quantum cryptographic schemes, which have not yet been realized experimentally by modifying some of our theoretically proposed secure communication schemes. Specifically, we have proposed optical designs for the …
The Internet of Things (IoT), as a cutting-edge integrated cross-technology, promises to informationize people's daily lives, while being threatened by continuous challenges of eavesdropping and tampering. The emerging quantum cryptography, harnessing the random nature of quantum mechanics, may also enable unconditionally secure control network, beyond the applications in secure communications. Here, we present a quantum-enhanced cryptographic remote control scheme that combines quantum randomness and one-time pad algorithm for delivering commands remotely. We experimentally demonstrate this o…
We develop cryptographically secure techniques to guarantee unconditional privacy for respondents to polls. Our constructions are efficient and practical, and are shown not to allow cheating respondents to affect the ``tally'' by more than their own vote -- which will be given the exact same weight as that of other respondents. We demonstrate solutions to this problem based on both traditional cryptographic techniques and quantum cryptography.
Quantum Cryptography is a rapidly developing field of research that benefits from the properties of Quantum Mechanics in performing cryptographic tasks. Quantum walks are a powerful model for quantum computation and very promising for quantum information processing. In this paper, we present a quantum public-key cryptographic system based on quantum walks. In particular, in the proposed protocol the public key is given by a quantum state generated by performing a quantum walk. We show that the protocol is secure and analyze the complexity of public-key generation and encryption/decryption proc…
Continuous variable one-way and controlled-two-way secure direct quantum communication schemes have been designed using Gaussian states. Specifically, a scheme for continuous variable quantum secure direct communication and another scheme for continuous variable controlled quantum dialogue are proposed using single-mode squeezed coherent states. The security of the proposed schemes against a set of attacks (e.g., Gaussian quantum cloning machine and intercept resend attacks) has been proved. Further, it is established that the proposed schemes do not require two-mode squeezed states which are …
We describe a new classical bit commitment protocol based on cryptographic constraints imposed by special relativity. The protocol is unconditionally secure against classical or quantum attacks. It evades the no-go results of Mayers, Lo and Chau by requiring from Alice a sequence of communications, including a post-revelation verification, each of which is guaranteed to be independent of its predecessor.
Properties of unitary time evolution of quantum systems can be applied to define quantum cryptographic protocols. Dynamics of a qubit can be exploited as a data encryption/decryption procedure by means of timed measurements, implementation of an open-loop control scheme over a qubit increases robustness of a protocol employing this principle.
Attacks on classical cryptographic protocols are usually modeled by allowing an adversary to ask queries from an oracle. Security is then defined by requiring that as long as the queries satisfy some constraint, there is some problem the adversary cannot solve, such as compute a certain piece of information. In this paper, we introduce a fundamentally new model of quantum attacks on classical cryptographic protocols, where the adversary is allowed to ask several classical queries in quantum superposition. This is a strictly stronger attack than the standard one, and we consider the security of…
Recent results of Kaplan et al., building on previous work by Kuwakado and Morii, have shown that a wide variety of classically-secure symmetric-key cryptosystems can be completely broken by quantum chosen-plaintext attacks (qCPA). In such an attack, the quantum adversary has the ability to query the cryptographic functionality in superposition. The vulnerable cryptosystems include the Even-Mansour block cipher, the three-round Feistel network, the Encrypted-CBC-MAC, and many others. In this work, we study simple algebraic adaptations of such schemes that replace $(\mathbb Z/2)^n$ addition wit…
We present a device independently secure quantum scheme for p-threshold all-or-nothing oblivious transfer. Novelty of the scheme is that, its security does not depend -- unlike the usual case -- on any quantum bit commitment protocol, rather it depends on Hardy's argument for two-qubit system. This scheme is shown to be unconditionally secure against any strategy allowed by quantum mechanics. By providing a secure scheme for all-or-nothing quantum oblivious transfer, we have answered a long standing open problem, other than the quantum key distribution, whether there is any two-party quantum c…
We consider a new model for the testing of untrusted quantum devices, consisting of a single polynomial-time bounded quantum device interacting with a classical polynomial-time verifier. In this model we propose solutions to two tasks - a protocol for efficient classical verification that the untrusted device is "truly quantum," and a protocol for producing certifiable randomness from a single untrusted quantum device. Our solution relies on the existence of a new cryptographic primitive for constraining the power of an untrusted quantum device: post-quantum secure trapdoor claw-free functions…
Alice is a charismatic quantum cryptographer who believes her parties are unmissable; Bob is a (relatively) glamorous string theorist who believes he is an indispensable guest. To prevent possibly traumatic collisions of self-perception and reality, their social code requires that decisions about invitation or acceptance be made via a cryptographically secure variable bias coin toss (VBCT). This generates a shared random bit by the toss of a coin whose bias is secretly chosen, within a stipulated range, by one of the parties; the other party learns only the random bit. Thus one party can secre…
In the classical world, the existence of commitments is equivalent to the existence of one-way functions. In the quantum setting, on the other hand, commitments are not known to imply one-way functions, but all known constructions of quantum commitments use at least one-way functions. Are one-way functions really necessary for commitments in the quantum world? In this work, we show that non-interactive quantum commitments (for classical messages) with computational hiding and statistical binding exist if pseudorandom quantum states exist. Pseudorandom quantum states are sets of quantum states …
Anonymity in networked communication is vital for many privacy-preserving tasks. Secure key distribution alone is insufficient for high-security communications, often knowing who transmits a message to whom and when must also be kept hidden from an adversary. Here we experimentally demonstrate 5 information-theoretically secure anonymity protocols on an 8 user city-wide quantum network using polarisation-entangled photon pairs. At the heart of these protocols is anonymous broadcasting, which is a cryptographic primitive that allows one user to reveal one bit of information while keeping her id…
Oblivious transfer is a powerful cryptographic primitive that is complete for secure multi-party computation. In oblivious transfer protocols a user sends one or more messages to a receiver, while the sender remains oblivious as to which messages have been received. Protocols for oblivious transfer cannot exist in a classical or fully-quantum world, but can be implemented by restricting the users' power. The isolated qubits model is a cryptographic model in which users are restricted to single-qubit operations and are not allowed to use entangling operations. Furthermore, all parties are allow…
