We study cheating strategies against a practical four-state quantum bit-commitment protocol [A. Danan and L. Vaidman, Quant. Info. Proc. 11, 769 (2012)] and its two-state variant [R. Loura et al., Phys. Rev. A 89, 052336 (2014)] when the underlying quantum channels are noisy and the cheating party is constrained to using single-qubit measurements only. We show that simply inferring the transmitted photons' states by using the Breidbart basis, optimal for ambiguous (minimum-error) state discrimination, does not directly produce an optimal cheating strategy for this bit-commitment protocol. We introduce a strategy, based on certain postmeasurement processes and show it to have better chances at cheating than the direct approach. We also study to what extent sending forged geographical coordinates helps a dishonest party in breaking the binding security requirement. Finally, we investigate the impact of imperfect single-photon sources in the protocols. Our study shows that, in terms of the resources used, the four-state protocol is advantageous over the two-state version. The analysis performed can be straightforwardly generalized to any finite-qubit measurement, with the same qualitative results.
We study cheating strategies against a practical four-state quantum bit-commitment protocol [A. Danan and L. Vaidman, Quant. Info. Proc. 11, 769 (2012)] and its two-state variant [R. Loura et al., Phys. Rev. A 89, 052336 (2014)] when the underlying quantum channels are noisy and the cheating party is constrained to using single-qubit measurements only. We show that simply inferring the transmitted photons' states by using the Breidbart basis, optimal for ambiguous (minimum-error) state discrimination, does not directly produce an optimal cheating strategy for this bit-commitment protocol. We introduce a strategy, based on certain postmeasurement processes and show it to have better chances at cheating than the direct approach. We also study to what extent sending forged geographical coordinates helps a dishonest party in breaking the binding security requirement. Finally, we investigate the impact of imperfect single-photon sources in the protocols. Our study shows that, in terms of the resources used, the four-state protocol is advantageous over the two-state version. The analysis performed can be straightforwardly generalized to any finite-qubit measurement, with the same qualitative results.
We present a two-state practical quantum bit commitment protocol, the security of which is based on the current technological limitations, namely the nonexistence of either stable long-term quantum memories or nondemolition measurements. For an optical realization of the protocol, we model the errors, which occur due to the noise and equipment (source, fibers, and detectors) imperfections, accumulated during emission, transmission, and measurement of photons. The optical part is modeled as a combination of a depolarizing channel (white noise), unitary evolution (e.g., systematic rotation of the polarization axis of photons), and two other basis-dependent channels, namely the phase- and bit-flip channels. We analyze quantitatively the effects of noise using two common information-theoretic measures of probability distribution distinguishability: the fidelity and the relative entropy. In particular, we discuss the optimal cheating strategy and show that it is always advantageous for a cheating agent to add some amount of white noise---the particular effect not being present in standard quantum security protocols. We also analyze the protocol's security when the use of (im)perfect nondemolition measurements and noisy or bounded quantum memories is allowed. Finally, we discuss errors occurring due to a finite detector efficiency, dark counts, and imperfect single-photon sources, and we show that the effects are the same as those of standard quantum cryptography.
Abstract We demonstrate experimentally the feasibility of a two-state quantum bit commitment protocol, which is both concealing and partially binding, assuming technological limitations. The security of this protocol is based on the lack of long-term stable quantum memories. We use a polarization-encoding scheme and optical fiber as a quantum channel. The measurement probability for the commitment is obtained and the optimal cheating strategy demonstrated. The average success rates for an honest player in the case where the measurements are performed using equal bases are 93.4%, when the rectilinear basis is measured, and 96.7%, when the diagonal basis is measured. The rates for the case when the measurements are performed in different bases are 52.9%, when the rectilinear basis is measured, and 55.4% when the diagonal basis is measured. The average success rates for the optimal cheating strategy are 80% and 73.8%, which are way below the success rates of an honest player. Using a strict numerical validity criterion, we show that, for these experimental values, the protocol is secure.
Bit commitment is an essential primitive in quantum cryptography. It is the basic building block of many cryptographic protocols in which it provides security over distrustful parties. This paper proposes a secured quantum two-bit commitment protocol for any two classical bits. The protocol contains two parties - a committer and a receiver - who share both quantum and classical communication channels. The main phases of this protocol are commitment and revealing phases where the concealing and binding conditions are proved in order to accept the commitment message. The proposed framework utilizes different security layers to hide specific quantum states in a superposition alongside trivial one qubit operations. The secured unitary transformations are applied by the two parties to meet the concealing and binding conditions. To verify the success of the proposed protocol, the measured output of the two parties are compared. The protocol operates under the assumption that the two parties might cheat and the possible existence of an eavesdropper.
This paper proposes a quantum protocol for a cheat-sensitive commitment of a classical bit. Alice, the receiver of the bit, can examine dishonest Bob, who changes or postpones his choice. Bob, the sender of the bit, can examine dishonest Alice, who violates concealment. For each round-trip case, Alice sends one of two spin states |S\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}⟩ by choosing basis S at random from two conjugate bases X and Y. Bob chooses basis C \ensuremath{\in} {X,Y} to perform a measurement and returns a resultant state |C\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}⟩. Alice then performs a measurement with the other basis R (\ensuremath{\ne}S) and obtains an outcome |R\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}⟩. In the opening phase, she can discover dishonest Bob, who unveils a wrong basis with a faked spin state, or Bob can discover dishonest Alice, who infers basis C but destroys |C\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}⟩ by setting R to be identical to S in the commitment phase. If a classical bit is coded in a block of m \ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{} n qubit particles, impartial examinations and probabilistic security criteria can be achieved.
It is well known that unconditionally secure bit commitment is impossible even in the quantum world. In this paper a weak variant of quantum bit commitment, introduced independently by Aharonov et al. [STOC, 2000] and Hardy and Kent [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92 (2004)] is investigated. In this variant, the parties require some nonzero probability of detecting a cheating, i.e. if Bob, who commits a bit b to Alice, changes his mind during the revealing phase then Alice detects the cheating with a positive probability (we call this property binding); and if Alice gains information about the committed bit before the revealing phase then Bob discovers this with positive probability (sealing). In our paper we give quantum bit commitment scheme that is simultaneously binding and sealing and we show that if a cheating gives epsilon advantage to a malicious Alice then Bob can detect the cheating with a probability Omega(epsilon^2). If Bob cheats then Alice's probability of detecting the cheating is greater than some fixed constant lambda>0. This improves the probabilities of cheating detections shown by Hardy and Kent and the scheme by Aharonov et al. who presented a protocol that is either binding or sealing, but not simultaneously both. To construct a cheat sensitive quantum bit commitment scheme we use a protocol for a weak quantum one-out-of-two oblivious transfer.
It is well known that no quantum bit commitment protocol is unconditionally secure. Nonetheless, there can be non-trivial upper bounds on both Bob's probability of correctly estimating Alice's commitment and Alice's probability of successfully unveiling whatever bit she desires. In this paper, we seek to determine these bounds for generalizations of the BB84 bit commitment protocol. In such protocols, an honest Alice commits to a bit by randomly choosing a state from a specified set and submitting this to Bob, and later unveils the bit to Bob by announcing the chosen state, at which point Bob measures the projector onto the state. Bob's optimal cheating strategy can be easily deduced from well known results in the theory of quantum state estimation. We show how to understand Alice's most general cheating strategy, (which involves her submitting to Bob one half of an entangled state) in terms of a theorem of Hughston, Jozsa and Wootters. We also show how the problem of optimizing Alice's cheating strategy for a fixed submitted state can be mapped onto a problem of state estimation. Finally, using the Bloch ball representation of qubit states, we identify the optimal coherent attack for a class of protocols that can be implemented with just a single qubit. These results provide a tight upper bound on Alice's probability of successfully unveiling whatever bit she desires in the protocol proposed by Aharonov et al., and lead us to identify a qubit protocol with even greater security.