We prove the unconditional security of a quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol on a noisy channel against the most general attack allowed by quantum physics. We use the fact that in a previous paper we have reduced the proof of the unconditionally security of this QKD protocol to a proof that a corresponding Quantum String Oblivious Transfer (String-QOT) protocol would be unconditionally secure against Bob if implemented on top of an unconditionally secure bit commitment scheme. We prove a lemma that extends a security proof given by Yao for a (one bit) QOT protocol to this String-QOT protocol. This result and the reduction mentioned above implies the unconditional security of our QKD protocol despite our previous proof that unconditionally secure bit commitment schemes are impossible.
We present simple protocols for oblivious transfer and password-based identification which are secure against general attacks in the noisy-quantum-storage model as defined in [KWW09]. We argue that a technical tool from [KWW09] suffices to prove security of the known protocols. Whereas the more involved protocol for oblivious transfer from [KWW09] requires less noise in storage to achieve security, our "canonical" protocols have the advantage of being simpler to implement and the security error is easier control. Therefore, our protocols yield higher OT-rates for many realistic noise parameter…
Cryptographic protocols are the backbone of our information society. This includes two-party protocols which offer protection against distrustful players. Such protocols can be built from a basic primitive called oblivious transfer. We present and experimentally demonstrate here the first quantum protocol for oblivious transfer for optical continuous-variable systems, and prove its security in the noisy-storage model. This model allows to establish security by sending more quantum signals than an attacker can reliably store during the protocol. The security proof is based on new uncertainty re…
Cryptography's importance in our everyday lives continues to grow in our increasingly digital world. Oblivious transfer (OT) has long been a fundamental and important cryptographic primitive since it is known that general two-party cryptographic tasks can be built from this basic building block. Here we show the experimental implementation of a 1-2 random oblivious transfer (ROT) protocol by performing measurements on polarization-entangled photon pairs in a modified entangled quantum key distribution system, followed by all of the necessary classical post-processing including one-way error co…
It was shown in [WST08] that cryptographic primitives can be implemented based on the assumption that quantum storage of qubits is noisy. In this work we analyze a protocol for the universal task of oblivious transfer that can be implemented using quantum-key-distribution (QKD) hardware in the practical setting where honest participants are unable to perform noise-free operations. We derive trade-offs between the amount of storage noise, the amount of noise in the operations performed by the honest participants and the security of oblivious transfer which are greatly improved compared to the r…
Oblivious transfer (OT) is an important tool in cryptography. It serves as a subroutine to other complex procedures of both theoretical and practical significance. Common attribute of OT protocols is that one party (Alice) has to send a message to another party (Bob) and has to stay oblivious on whether Bob did receive the message. Specific (OT) protocols vary by exact definition of the task - in the all-or-nothing protocol Alice sends a single bit-string message, which Bob is able to read only with 50% probability, whereas in 1-out-of-2 OT protocol Bob reads one out of two messages sent by Al…
We present a bit-string quantum oblivious transfer protocol based on single-qubit rotations. Our protocol is built upon a previously proposed quantum public-key protocol and its practical security relies on the laws of Quantum Mechanics. Practical security is reflected in the fact that, due to technological limitations, the receiver (Bob) of the transferred bit-string is restricted to performing only "few-qubit" coherent measurements. We also present a single-bit oblivious transfer based on the proposed bit-string protocol. The protocol can be implemented with current technology based on optic…
All existing quantum oblivious transfer protocols are to realize the oblivious transfer of bit or bit-string. In this paper, p-Rabin quantum oblivious transfer of a qubit (abbr. p-Rabin qubit-OT) is achieved by using a probabilistic teleportation (abbr. PT) protocol. Here, this is the first time that the concept of qubit-OT is presented. As the PT protocol is able to transfer an (un)known pure state with a certain probability, this feature makes the PT protocol well fit for Rabin OT. Furthermore, the PT protocol can be used for OT of a bit by encoding classical bit with two pre-agreed orthogon…
Among the most studied tasks in Quantum Cryptography one can find Bit Commitment (BC) and Oblivious Transfer (OT), two central cryptographic primitives. In this paper we propose for the first time protocols for these tasks in the measurement-device independent (MDI) settings and analyze their security. We analyze two different cases: first we assume the parties have access to perfect single photon sources (but still in the presence of noise and losses), and second we assume that they only have imperfect single photon sources. In the first case we propose a protocol for both BC and OT and prove…
We present the first protocol for oblivious transfer that can be implemented with an optical continuous-variable system, and prove its security in the noisy-storage model. This model allows security to be achieved by sending more quantum signals than an attacker can reliably store at one specific point during the protocol. Concretely, we determine how many signals need to be sent in order to achieve security by establishing a trade-off between quantum uncertainty generated in the protocol and the classical capacity of the memory channel. As our main technical tool, we study and derive new unce…
MiniQCrypt is a world where quantum-secure one-way functions exist, and quantum communication is possible. We construct an oblivious transfer (OT) protocol in MiniQCrypt that achieves simulation-security in the plain model against malicious quantum polynomial-time adversaries, building on the foundational work of Bennett, Brassard, Crépeau and Skubiszewska (CRYPTO 1991). Combining the OT protocol with prior works, we obtain secure two-party and multi-party computation protocols also in MiniQCrypt. This is in contrast to the classical world, where it is widely believed that one-way functions al…
The noisy-storage model allows the implementation of secure two-party protocols under the sole assumption that no large-scale reliable quantum storage is available to the cheating party. No quantum storage is thereby required for the honest parties. Examples of such protocols include bit commitment, oblivious transfer and secure identification. Here, we provide a guideline for the practical implementation of such protocols. In particular, we analyze security in a practical setting where the honest parties themselves are unable to perform perfect operations and need to deal with practical probl…
Fundamental primitives such as bit commitment and oblivious transfer serve as building blocks for many other two-party protocols. Hence, the secure implementation of such primitives are important in modern cryptography. In this work, we present a bit commitment protocol which is secure as long as the attacker's quantum memory device is imperfect. The latter assumption is known as the noisy-storage model. We experimentally executed this protocol by performing measurements on polarization-entangled photon pairs. Our work includes a full security analysis, accounting for all experimental error ra…
We present a new template for building oblivious transfer from quantum information that we call the "fixed basis" framework. Our framework departs from prior work (eg., Crepeau and Kilian, FOCS '88) by fixing the correct choice of measurement basis used by each player, except for some hidden trap qubits that are intentionally measured in a conjugate basis. We instantiate this template in the quantum random oracle model (QROM) to obtain simple protocols that implement, with security against malicious adversaries: 1. Non-interactive random-input bit OT in a model where parties share EPR pairs a …
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…
We show how to implement cryptographic primitives based on the realistic assumption that quantum storage of qubits is noisy. We thereby consider individual-storage attacks, i.e. the dishonest party attempts to store each incoming qubit separately. Our model is similar to the model of bounded-quantum storage, however, we consider an explicit noise model inspired by present-day technology. To illustrate the power of this new model, we show that a protocol for oblivious transfer (OT) is secure for any amount of quantum-storage noise, as long as honest players can perform perfect quantum operation…
In the well-studied cryptographic primitive 1-out-of-N oblivious transfer, a user retrieves a single element from a database of size N without the database learning which element was retrieved. While it has previously been shown that a secure implementation of 1-out-of-N oblivious transfer is impossible against arbitrarily powerful adversaries, recent research has revealed an interesting class of private query protocols based on quantum mechanics in a cheat sensitive model. Specifically, a practical protocol does not need to guarantee that database cannot learn what element was retrieved if do…
We consider the implementation of two-party cryptographic primitives based on the sole assumption that no large-scale reliable quantum storage is available to the cheating party. We construct novel protocols for oblivious transfer and bit commitment, and prove that realistic noise levels provide security even against the most general attack. Such unconditional results were previously only known in the so-called bounded-storage model which is a special case of our setting. Our protocols can be implemented with present-day hardware used for quantum key distribution. In particular, no quantum sto…
Sampling from the output distribution of chaotic quantum evolutions, and of pseudo-random universal quantum circuits in particular, has been proposed as a prominent milestone for near-term quantum supremacy. The same paper notes that chaotic distributions are very sensitive to noise, and under quite general noise models converge to the uniform distribution over bit-strings exponentially in the number of gates. On the one hand, for increasing number of gates, it suffices to choose bit-strings at random to approximate the noisy distribution with fixed statistical distance. On the other hand, cro…
In secure quantum communication protocols, a set of single qubits prepared using 2 or more mutually unbiased bases or a set of $n$-qubit ($n\geq2$) entangled states of a particular form are usually used to form a verification string which is subsequently used to detect traces of eavesdropping. The qubits that form a verification string are referred to as decoy qubits, and there exists a large set of different quantum states that can be used as decoy qubits. In the absence of noise, any choice of decoy qubits provides equivalent security. In this paper, we examine such equivalence for noisy env…
Random quantum sampling, a task to sample bit-strings from a random quantum circuit, is considered one of suitable benchmark tasks to demonstrate the outperformance of quantum computers even with noisy qubits. Recently, random quantum sampling was performed on the Sycamore quantum processor with 53 qubits [Nature 574, 505 (2019)] and on the Zuchongzhi quantum processor with 56 qubits [Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 180501 (2021)]. Here, we analyze and compare statistical properties of the outputs of random quantum sampling by Sycamore and Zuchongzhi. Using the Marchenko-Pastur law and the Wasssertein d…
Learning a hidden parity function from noisy data, known as learning parity with noise (LPN), is an example of intelligent behavior that aims to generalize a concept based on noisy examples. The solution to LPN immediately leads to decoding a random binary linear code in the presence of classification noise. This problem is thought to be intractable classically, but can be solved efficiently if a quantum oracle can be queried. However, in practice, a learner is more likely to receive data from classical oracles. In this work, we show that a naive application of the quantum LPN algorithm to cla…
Heisenberg scaling characterizes the ultimate precision of parameter estimation enabled by quantum mechanics, which represents an important quantum advantage of both theoretical and technological interest. Here, we study the attainability of strong, global notions of Heisenberg scaling in the fundamental problem of phase estimation, from a practical standpoint. A main message of this work is an asymptotic noise "threshold" for global Heisenberg scaling. We first demonstrate that Heisenberg scaling is fragile to noises in the sense that it cannot be achieved in the presence of phase damping noi…
We consider the cryptographic task of bit-string generation. This is a generalisation of coin tossing in which two mistrustful parties wish to generate a string of random bits such that an honest party can be sure that the other cannot have biased the string too much. We consider a quantum protocol for this task, originally introduced in Phys. Rev. A {\bf 69}, 022322 (2004), that is feasible with present day technology. We introduce security conditions based on the average bias of the bits and the Shannon entropy of the string. For each, we prove rigorous security bounds for this protocol in b…
In quantum communication via noisy channels, the error probability scales exponentially with the length of the channel. We present a scheme of a quantum repeater that overcomes this limitation. The central idea is to connect a string of (imperfect) entangled pairs of particles by using a novel nested purification protocol, thereby creating a single distant pair of high fidelity. The scheme tolerates general errors on the percent level.
We systematically investigate the robustness of symmetry protected topological (SPT) order in open quantum systems by studying the evolution of string order parameters and other probes under noisy channels. We find that one-dimensional SPT order is robust against noisy couplings to the environment that satisfy a strong symmetry condition, while it is destabilized by noise that satisfies only a weak symmetry condition, which generalizes the notion of symmetry for closed systems. We also discuss "transmutation" of SPT phases into other SPT phases of equal or lesser complexity, under noisy channe…
Recent technological developments have focused the interest of the quantum computing community on investigating how near-term devices could outperform classical computers for practical applications. A central question that remains open is whether their noise can be overcome or it fundamentally restricts any potential quantum advantage. We present a transparent way of comparing classical algorithms to quantum ones running on near-term quantum devices for a large family of problems that include optimization problems and approximations to the ground state energy of Hamiltonians. Our approach is b…
We study classical and quantum maps on the torus phase space, in the presence of noise. We focus on the spectral properties of the noisy evolution operator, and prove that for any amount of noise, the quantum spectrum converges to the classical one in the semiclassical limit. The small-noise behaviour of the classical spectrum highly depends on the dynamics generated by the map. For a chaotic dynamics, the outer spectrum consists in isolated eigenvalues (``resonances'') inside the unit circle, leading to an exponential damping of correlations. On the opposite, in the case of a regular map, par…
Yau Mathematical Sciences Center and Department of Mathematics, Tsinghua University（丘成桐数学科学中心）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Yanqi Lake Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications（北京雁栖湖应用数学研究院）
The discrete logarithm problem (DLP) is the basis for several cryptographic primitives. Since Shor's work, it has been known that the DLP can be solved by combining a polynomial-size quantum circuit and a polynomial-time classical post-processing algorithm. Evaluating and predicting the instance size that quantum devices can solve is an emerging research topic. In this paper, we propose a quantitative measure based on the success probability of the post-processing algorithm to determine whether an experiment on a quantum device (or a classical simulator) succeeded. We also propose a procedure …
Recently, Google announced the first demonstration of quantum computational supremacy with a programmable superconducting processor. Their demonstration is based on collecting samples from the output distribution of a noisy random quantum circuit, then applying a statistical test to those samples called Linear Cross-Entropy Benchmarking (Linear XEB). This raises a theoretical question: how hard is it for a classical computer to spoof the results of the Linear XEB test? In this short note, we adapt an analysis of Aaronson and Chen [2017] to prove a conditional hardness result for Linear XEB spo…
We consider the problem of secure key distribution among $n$ trustful agents: the goal is to distribute an identical random bit-string among the $n$ agents over a noisy channel such that eavesdroppers learn little about it. We study the general situation where the only resources required are secure bipartite key distribution and authenticated classical communication. Accordingly, multipartite quantum key distribution can be proven unconditionally secure by reducing the problem to the biparitite case and invoking the proof of security of bipartite quantum key distribution.
We construct the first constant-round protocols for secure quantum computation in the two-party (2PQC) and multi-party (MPQC) settings with security against malicious adversaries. Our protocols are in the common random string (CRS) model. - Assuming two-message oblivious transfer (OT), we obtain (i) three-message 2PQC, and (ii) five-round MPQC with only three rounds of online (input-dependent) communication; such OT is known from quantum-hard Learning with Errors (QLWE). - Assuming sub-exponential hardness of QLWE, we obtain (i) three-round 2PQC with two online rounds and (ii) four-round MPQC …
Pauli Weight Hamiltonian Term Selection for Optimized Machine Learning Based Quantum Error Mitigation
Bandung Institute of Technology（万隆理工学院）；National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN)（国家研究与创新署）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Observation of Robust and Coherent Non-Abelian Hadron Dynamics on Noisy Quantum Processors
Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani（比拉理工学院）；IBM Quantum, IBM India Research Lab（IBM量子，印度IBM研究实验室）；IBM Quantum, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM量子，T.J.沃森研究中心）
Lattice gauge theories are a fascinating and rich class of theories relating to the most fundamental models of particle physics, and as experimental control on the quantum level increases there is a growing interest in non-equilibrium effects such as dynamical quantum phase transitions. To demonstrate how these physical theories can be accessed in near-term quantum devices, we study the dynamics of a (1+1)D U(1) quantum link model following quenches of its mass-term. We find that the system undergoes dynamical quantum phase transitions for all system sizes considered, even the smallest where t…
