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arXiv:1804.04730

Secure certification of mixed quantum states with application to two-party randomness generation

Frédéric Dupuis, Serge Fehr, Philippe Lamontagne, Louis Salvail

Published Apr 12, 2018• 0 citations
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Abstract

We investigate sampling procedures that certify that an arbitrary quantum state on $n$ subsystems is close to an ideal mixed state $φ^{\otimes n}$ for a given reference state $φ$, up to errors on a few positions. This task makes no sense classically: it would correspond to certifying that a given bitstring was generated according to some desired probability distribution. However, in the quantum case, this is possible if one has access to a prover who can supply a purification of the mixed state. In this work, we introduce the concept of mixed-state certification, and we show that a natural sampling protocol offers secure certification in the presence of a possibly dishonest prover: if the verifier accepts then he can be almost certain that the state in question has been correctly prepared, up to a small number of errors. We then apply this result to two-party quantum coin-tossing. Given that strong coin tossing is impossible, it is natural to ask "how close can we get". This question has been well studied and is nowadays well understood from the perspective of the bias of individual coin tosses. We approach and answer this question from a different---and somewhat orthogonal---perspective, where we do not look at individual coin tosses but at the global entropy instead. We show how two distrusting parties can produce a common high-entropy source, where the entropy is an arbitrarily small fraction below the maximum (except with negligible probability).

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1804.04730

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In coin tossing two remote participants want to share a uniformly distributed random bit. At the least in the quantum version, each participant test whether or not the other has attempted to create a bias on this bit. It is requested that, for b = 0,1, the probability that Alice gets bit b and pass the test is smaller than 1/2 whatever she does, and similarly for Bob. If the bound 1/2 holds perfectly against any of the two participants, the task realised is called an exact coin tossing. If the bound is actually 1/2+ξ1/2 + \xi1/2+ξ where the bias ξ\xiξ vanishes when a security parameter m defined by the protocol increases, the task realised is a (non exact) coin tossing. It is found here that exact coin tossing is impossible. At the same time, an unconditionally secure quantum protocol that realises a (non exact) coin tossing is proposed. The protocol executes m biased quantum coin tossing procedures at the same time. It executes the first round in each of these m procedures sequentially, then the second rounds are executed, and so on until the end of the n procedures. Each procedure requires 4n particles where n∈O(lg⁡m)n \in O(\lg m)n∈O(lgm). The final bit x is the parity of the m random bits. The information about each of these m bits is announced a little bit at a time which implies that the principle used against bit commitment does not apply. The bias on x is smaller than 1/m1/m1/m. The result is discussed in the light of the impossibility result for exact coin tossing.
We consider the cryptographic task of bit-string generation. This is a generalization 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 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 both noiseless and noisy conditions under the most general attacks allowed by quantum mechanics. Roughly speaking, in the absence of noise, a cheater can only bias significantly a vanishing fraction of the bits, whereas in the presence of noise, a cheater can bias a constant fraction, with this fraction depending quantitatively on the level of noise. We also discuss classical protocols for the same task, deriving upper bounds on how well a classical protocol can perform. This enables the determination of how much noise the quantum protocol can tolerate while still outperforming classical protocols. We raise several conjectures concerning both quantum and classical possibilities for large nnn cryptography. An experiment corresponding to the scheme analyzed in this paper has been performed and is reported elsewhere.
It has been claimed that ideal quantum coin tossing is impossible, both symmetrically and asymmetrically. The claim is partly based on the assumption that the shared entangled state cannot be verified. This assumption perhaps challenges the very foundation of quantum mechanics. However, the claim has been widely accepted. Here, we show that ideal quantum coin tossing is asymmetrically possible. In other words, in a two-party quantum coin-tossing protocol, zero bias against cheating can be achieved by one party.
One of the striking properties of quantum mechanics is the occurrence of the Bell-type non-locality. They are a fundamental feature of the theory that allows two parties that share an entangled quantum system to observe correlations stronger than possible in classical physics. In addition to their theoretical significance, non-local correlations have practical applications, such as device-independent randomness generation, providing private unpredictable numbers even when obtained using devices delivered by an untrusted vendor. Thus, determining the quantity of certifiable randomness that can be produced using a specific set of non-local correlations is of significant interest. First, we present an experimental realization of recent Bell-type operators designed to provide private random numbers that are secure against adversaries with quantum resources. We use semi-definite programming to give lower bounds on the generated randomness in terms of both min-entropy and von Neumann entropy in a device-independent scenario. Our results demonstrate the first experiment that certifies nearly two bits of randomness from binary measurements of two parties [1], [2]. Apart from single-round certification, we provide an analysis of finite-key protocol for quantum randomness expansion using the Entropy Accumulation Theorem. Second, we present an efficient and practical method for certifying quantum randomness using generalized measurements. Indeed, we have derived a method for self-testing the presence of POVMs. We present the certification of more than one bit of min-entropy from a single POVM on one of the qubits of an entangled state using a variant of the elegant Bell inequality. We also obtain more than one bit of randomness in a prepare and measure scenario of a similar structure with a POVM on a single qubit [3]. We provide numerical simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of our randomness certification and expansion.
Entanglement in bipartite systems has been applied to generate secure random numbers, which are playing an important role in cryptography or scientific numerical simulations. Here, we propose to use multipartite entanglement distributed between trusted and untrusted parties for generating randomness of arbitrary dimensional systems. We show that the distributed structure of several parties leads to additional protection against possible attacks by an eavesdropper, resulting in more secure randomness generated than in the corresponding bipartite scenario. Especially, randomness can be certified in the group of untrusted parties, even when there is no randomness in either of them individually. We prove that the necessary and sufficient resource for quantum randomness in this scenario is multipartite quantum steering when each untrusted party has a choice between only two measurements. However, the sufficiency no longer holds with more measurement settings. Finally, we apply our analysis to some experimentally realized states and show that more randomness can be extracted compared with the existing analysis.