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arXiv:1101.4587 · Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical

Quantum key distribution based on orthogonal states allows secure quantum bit commitment

Guang Ping He

Published Oct 14, 2011• 29 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

For more than a decade, it was believed that unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment (QBC) is impossible. But basing on a previously proposed quantum key distribution scheme using orthogonal states, here we build a QBC protocol in which the density matrices of the quantum states encoding the commitment do not satisfy a crucial condition on which the no-go proofs of QBC are based. Thus the no-go proofs could be evaded. Our protocol is fault-tolerant and very feasible with currently available technology. It reopens the venue for other "post-cold-war" multi-party cryptographic protocols, e.g., quantum bit string commitment and quantum strong coin tossing with an arbitrarily small bias. This result also has a strong influence on the Clifton-Bub-Halvorson theorem which suggests that quantum theory could be characterized in terms of information-theoretic constraints.

DOI
10.1088/1751-8113/44/44/445305

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For more than a decade, it was believed that unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment (QBC) is impossible. But basing on a previously proposed quantum key distribution scheme using orthogonal states, here we build a QBC protocol in which the density matrices of the quantum states encoding the commitment do not satisfy a crucial condition on which the no-go proofs of QBC are based. Thus the no-go proofs could be evaded. Our protocol is fault-tolerant and very feasible with currently available technology. It reopens the venue for other "post-cold-war" multi-party cryptographic protocols, e.g., quantum bit string commitment and quantum strong coin tossing with an arbitrarily small bias. This result also has a strong influence on the Clifton-Bub-Halvorson theorem which suggests that quantum theory could be characterized in terms of information-theoretic constraints.
It is generally believed that unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment (QBC) is proven impossible by a "no-go theorem". We point out that the theorem only establishes the existence of a cheating unitary transformation in any QBC scheme secure against the receiver, but this fact alone is not sufficient to rule out unconditionally secure QBC as a matter of principle, because there exists no proof that the cheating unitary transformation must be known to the cheater in all possible cases. In this work, we show how to circumvent the "no-go theorem" and prove that unconditionally secure QBC is in fact possible.
Oblivious transfer (OT) and bit commitment (BC) are two-party cryptographic protocols which play crucial roles in the construction of various cryptographic protocols. We propose three practical quantum cryptographic protocols in this paper. We first construct a practical quantum random oblivious transfer (R-OT) protocol based on the fact that non-orthogonal states cannot be reliably distinguished. Then, we construct a fault-tolerant one-out-of-two oblivious transfer ( O T 1 2 ) protocol based on the quantum R-OT protocol. Afterwards, we propose a quantum bit commitment (QBC) protocol which executes the fault-tolerant O T 1 2 several times. Mayers, Lo and Chau (MLC) no-go theorem proves that QBC protocol cannot be unconditionally secure. However, we find that computing the unitary transformation of no-go theorem attack needs so many resources that it is not realistically implementable. We give a definition of physical security for QBC protocols and prove that the practical QBC we proposed is physically secure and can be implemented in the real world.
We further study the security of the quantum bit commitment (QBC) protocol we previously proposed [Phys. Rev. A 74, 022332 (2006).], by analyzing the reduced density matrix ρ_{b}^{B} which describes the quantum state at Bob's side corresponding to Alice's committed bit b. It is shown that Alice will find ρ_{0}^{B}\perp ρ_{1}^{B} while the protocol remains concealing to Bob. On the contrary, the existing no-go theorem of unconditionally secure QBC is based on the condition ρ_{0}^{B}\simeq ρ_{1}^{B}. Thus the specific cheating strategy proposed in the no-go theorem does not necessarily applies to our protocol.
Unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment (QBC) was considered impossible. But the no-go proofs are based on the Hughston–Jozsa–Wootters (HJW) theorem (a.k.a. the Uhlmann theorem). Recently, it was found that in high-dimensional systems, there exist some states which can display a chaos effect in quantum steering, so that the attack strategy based on the HJW theorem has to require the capability of discriminating quantum states with very subtle difference, to the extent that is not allowed by the uncertainty principle. With the help of this finding, here we propose a simple QBC protocol which manages to evade the no-go proofs.
There had been well known claims of unconditionally secure quantum protocols for bit commitment. However, we, and independently Mayers, showed that all proposed quantum bit commitment schemes are, in principle, insecure because the sender, Alice, can almost always cheat successfully by using an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) type of attack and delaying her measurements. One might wonder if secure quantum bit commitment protocols exist at all. We answer this question by showing that the same type of attack by Alice will, in principle, break any bit commitment scheme. The cheating strategy generally requires a quantum computer. We emphasize the generality of this ``no-go theorem'': Unconditionally secure bit commitment schemes based on quantum mechanics---fully quantum, classical or quantum but with measurements---are all ruled out by this result. Since bit commitment is a useful primitive for building up more sophisticated protocols such as zero-knowledge proofs, our results cast very serious doubt on the security of quantum cryptography in the so-called ``post-cold-war'' applications. We also show that ideal quantum coin tossing is impossible because of the EPR attack. This no-go theorem for ideal quantum coin tossing may help to shed some lights on the possibility of non-ideal protocols.
The existence of unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment (QBC) is excluded by the Mayers-Lo-Chau no-go theorem. Here we look for the second-best: a QBC protocol that can defeat certain quantum attacks. By breaking the knowledge symmetry between the participants with quantum algorithm, a QBC protocol is proposed and is proven to be secure against a major kind of coherent attacks---the dummy attack, in which the participant makes an empty promise instead of committing to a specific bit. Therefore it surpasses previous QBC protocols which are secure against individual attacks only.