How Entanglement Reshapes the Geometry of Quantum Differential Privacy
Xi Wang, Parastoo Sadeghi, Guodong Shi
Quantum differential privacy provides a rigorous framework for quantifying privacy guarantees in quantum information processing. While classical correlations are typically regarded as adversarial to privacy, the role of their quantum analogue, entanglement, is not well understood. In this work, we investigate how quantum entanglement fundamentally shapes quantum local differential privacy (QLDP). We consider a bipartite quantum system whose input state has a prescribed level of entanglement, characterized by a lower bound on the entanglement entropy. Each subsystem is then processed by a local quantum mechanism and measured using local operations only, ensuring that no additional entanglement is generated during the process. Our main result reveals a sharp phase-transition phenomenon in the relation between entanglement and QLDP: below a mechanism-dependent entropy threshold, the optimal privacy leakage level mirrors that of unentangled inputs; beyond this threshold, the exact privacy leakage is strictly smaller than its unentangled value and admits an explicitly computable upper bound that strictly decreases with the entropy. This bound can also certify that some non-private mechanisms become private under sufficiently strong entanglement constraints. The phase-transition phenomenon gives rise to a nonlinear dependence of the certified privacy-leakage upper bound on the entanglement entropy, even though the underlying quantum mechanisms and measurements are linear. We show that the transition is governed by the intrinsic non-convex geometry of the set of entanglement-constrained quantum states, which we parametrize as a smooth manifold and analyze via Riemannian optimization. Our findings demonstrate that entanglement serves as a genuine privacy-enhancing resource, offering a geometric and operational foundation for designing robust privacy-preserving quantum protocols.
cs.ITCross-listedarXiv:2601.19126•Jan 28, 2026•0 citations