Dirac sought an interpretation of mathematical formalism in terms of physical entities and Einstein insisted that physics should describe real states of the real While Bell inequalities put into question the reality of states, modern device-independent approaches do away with the idea of entities: physics is not built of physical systems. Focusing on the correlations between operationally defined inputs and outputs, device-independent methods promote a view more distant from conventional theory than Einstein's 'principle theories' were from 'constructive theories'. On the examples of indefinite causal orders and almost quantum correlations, we ask a puzzling question: if physical theory is not about systems, then what is it about? The answer given by the device-independent models is that physics is about languages. In moving away from the information-theoretic reconstructions of quantum theory, this answer marks a new conceptual development in the foundations of physics.
The emergence of quantum theory at the beginning of 20
−th century has changed our view of the microscopic world and has led to applications such as quantum teleportation, quantum random number generation and quantum computation to name a few, that could never have been realised using classical systems. One such application that has attracted considerable attention lately is device-independent (DI) certification of composite quantum systems. The basic idea behind it is to treat a given device as a black box that given some input generates an output, and then to verify whether it works as expected by only studying the statistics generated by this device. The novelty of these certification schemes lies in the fact that one can almost completely characterise the device (up to certain equivalences) under minimal physically well-motivated assumptions such as that the device is described using quantum theory. The resource required in most of these certification schemes is quantum non-locality. In this thesis, we construct schemes to device-independently certify quantum states and quantum measurements in Hilbert spaces of arbitrary dimension along with the optimal amount randomness that one can extract from any quantum system of arbitrary dimension.
There is a looming threat over current methods of data encryption through advances in quantum computation. Interestingly, this potential threat can be countered through the use of quantum resources such as coherent superposition, entanglement and inherent randomness. These, together with non-clonability of arbitrary quantum states, offer provably secure means of sharing encryption keys between two parties. This physically assured privacy is however provably secure only in theory but not in practice. Device independent approaches seek to provide physically assured privacy of devices of untrusted origin. The quest towards realization of such devices is predicated on conducting loop-hole-free Bell tests which require the use of certified quantum random number generators. The experimental apparatuses for conducting such tests themselves use non-ideal sources, detectors and optical components making such certification extremely difficult. This expository chapter presents a brief overview (not a review) of Device Independence and the conceptual and practical difficulties it entails.