We introduce a protocol between a classical polynomial-time verifier and a quantum polynomial-time prover that allows the verifier to securely delegate to the prover the preparation of certain single-qubit quantum states The prover is unaware of which state he received and moreover, the verifier can check with high confidence whether the preparation was successful. The delegated preparation of single-qubit states is an elementary building block in many quantum cryptographic protocols. We expect our implementation of "random remote state preparation with verification", a functionality first defined in (Dunjko and Kashefi 2014), to be useful for removing the need for quantum communication in such protocols while keeping functionality. The main application that we detail is to a protocol for blind and verifiable delegated quantum computation (DQC) that builds on the work of (Fitzsimons and Kashefi 2018), who provided such a protocol with quantum communication. Recently, both blind an verifiable DQC were shown to be possible, under computational assumptions, with a classical polynomial-time client (Mahadev 2017, Mahadev 2018). Compared to the work of Mahadev, our protocol is more modular, applies to the measurement-based model of computation (instead of the Hamiltonian model) and is composable. Our proof of security builds on ideas introduced in (Brakerski et al. 2018).
We introduce a protocol between a classical polynomial-time verifier and a quantum polynomial-time prover that allows the verifier to securely delegate to the prover the preparation of certain single-qubit quantum states The prover is unaware of which state he received and moreover, the verifier can check with high confidence whether the preparation was successful. The delegated preparation of single-qubit states is an elementary building block in many quantum cryptographic protocols. We expect our implementation of "random remote state preparation with verification", a functionality first defined in (Dunjko and Kashefi 2014), to be useful for removing the need for quantum communication in such protocols while keeping functionality. The main application that we detail is to a protocol for blind and verifiable delegated quantum computation (DQC) that builds on the work of (Fitzsimons and Kashefi 2018), who provided such a protocol with quantum communication. Recently, both blind an verifiable DQC were shown to be possible, under computational assumptions, with a classical polynomial-time client (Mahadev 2017, Mahadev 2018). Compared to the work of Mahadev, our protocol is more modular, applies to the measurement-based model of computation (instead of the Hamiltonian model) and is composable. Our proof of security builds on ideas introduced in (Brakerski et al. 2018).
Quantum computers promise to offer a considerable speed-up in solving certain problems, compared to the best classical algorithms. In many instances, the gap between quantum and classical running times is conjectured to be exponential. While this is great news for those applications where quantum computers would provide such an advantage, it also raises a significant challenge: how can classical computers verify the correctness of quantum computations? In attempting to answer this question, a number of protocols have been developed in which a classical client (referred to as verifier) can interact with one or more quantum servers (referred to as provers) in order to certify the correctness of a quantum computation performed by the server(s). These protocols are of one of two types: either there are multiple non-communicating provers, sharing entanglement, and the verifier is completely classical; or, there is a single prover and the classical verifier has a device for preparing or measuring quantum states. The latter type of protocols are, arguably, more relevant to near term quantum computers, since having multiple quantum computers that share a large amount of entanglement is, from a technological standpoint, extremely challenging. Before the realisation of practical single-prover protocols, a number of challenges need to be addressed: how robust are these protocols to noise on the verifier's device? Can the protocols be made fault-tolerant without significantly increasing the requirements of the verifier? How do we know that the verifier's device is operating correctly? Could this device be eliminated completely, thus having a protocol with a fully classical verifier and a single quantum prover? Our work attempts to provide answers to these questions. First, we consider a single-prover verification protocol developed by Fitzsimons and Kashefi and show that this protocol is indeed robust with respect to deviations on the quantum state prepared by the verifier. We show that this is true even if those deviations are the result of a correlation with the prover's system. We then use this result to give a verification protocol which is device- independent. The protocol consists of a verifier with a measurement device and a single prover. Device-independence means that the verifier need not trust the measurement device (nor the prover) which can be assumed to be fully malicious (though not communicating with the prover). A key element in realising this protocol is a robust technique of Reichardt, Unger and Vazirani for testing, using non-local correlations, that two untrusted devices share a large number of entangled states. This technique is referred to as rigidity of non-local correlations. Our second result is to prove a rigidity result for a type of quantum correlations known as steering correlations. To do this, we first show that steering correlations can be used in order to certify maximally entangled states, in a setting in which each test is independent of the previous one. We also show that the fidelity with which we characterise the state, in this specific test, is optimal. We then improve the previous result by removing the independence assumption. This then leads to our desired rigidity result. We make use of it, in a similar fashion to the device-independent case, in order to give a verification protocol that is one-sided device-independent. The importance of this application is to show how different trust assumptions affect the efficiency of the protocol. Next, we describe a protocol for fault-tolerantly verifying quantum computations, with minimal "quantum requirements" for the verifier. Specifically, the verifier only requires a device for measuring single-qubit states. Both this device, and the prover's operations are assumed to be prone to errors. We show that under standard assumptions about the error model, it is possible to achieve verification of quantum computation using fault-tolerant principles. As a proof of principle, and to better illustrate the inner workings of the protocol, we describe a toy implementation of the protocol in a quantum simulator, and present the results we obtained, when running it for a small computation. Finally, we explore the possibility of having a verification protocol, with a classical verifier and a single prover, such that the prover is blind with respect to the verifier's computation. We give evidence that this is not possible. In fact, our result is only concerned with blind quantum computation with a classical client, and uses complexity theoretic results to argue why it is improbable for such a protocol to exist. We then use these complexity theoretic techniques to show that a client, with the ability to prepare and send quantum states to a quantum server, would not be able to delegate arbitrary NP problems to that server. In other words, even a client with quantum capabilities cannot exploit those capabilities to delegate the computation of NP problems, while keeping the input, to that computation, private. This is again true, provided certain complexity theoretic conjectures are true.
We introduce a device-independent two-prover scheme in which a classical verifier can use a simple untrusted quantum measurement device (the client device) to securely delegate a quantum computation to an untrusted quantum server. To do this, we construct a parallel self-testing protocol to perform device-independent remote state preparation of n qubits and compose this with the unconditionally secure universal verifiable blind quantum computation (VBQC) scheme of Fitzsimons and Kashefi []. Our self-test achieves a multitude of desirable properties for the application we consider, giving rise to practical and fully device-independent VBQC. It certifies parallel measurements of all cardinal and intercardinal directions in the X Y plane as well as the computational basis, uses few input questions (of size logarithmic in n for the client and a constant number communicated to the server) and requires only single-qubit measurements to be performed by the client device.
The promise of scalable quantum technology appears more realistic, after recent advances in both theory and experiment. Assuming a quantum computer is developed, the task of verifying the correctness of its outcome becomes crucial. Unfortunately, for a system that involves many particles, predicting its evolution via classical simulation becomes intractable. Moreover, verification of the outcome by computational methods, i.e. involving a classical witness, is believed inefficient for the hardest problems solvable by a quantum computer. A feasible alternative to verify quantum computation is via cryptographic methods, where an untrusted prover has to convince a weak verifier for the correctness of his outcome. This is the approach we take in this thesis. In the most standard configuration the prover is capable of computing all polynomial-time quantum circuits and the verifier is restricted to classical with very modest quantum power. The goal of existing verification protocols is to reduce the quantum requirements for the verifier - ideally making it purely classical - and reduce the communication complexity. In Part II we propose a composition of two existing verification protocols [Fitzsimons and Kashefi, 2012], [Aharonov et al., 2010] that achieves quadratic improvement in communication complexity, while keeping the quantum requirements for the verifier modest. Along this result, several new techniques are proposed, including the generalization of [Fitzsimons and Kashefi, 2012] to prime dimensions. In Part III we discuss the idea of model-specific quantum verification, where the prover is restricted to intermediate quantum power, i.e. between full-fledged quantum and purely classical, thus more feasible experimentally. As a proof of principle we propose a verification protocol for the One-Pure-Qubit computer [Knill and Laflamme, 1998], which tolerates noise and is capable of computing hard problems such as large matrix trace estimation. The verification protocol is an adaptation of [Fitzsimons and Kashefi, 2012] running on Measurement-Based Quantum Computing with newly proved properties of the underlying resources. Connections of quantum verification to other security primitives are considered in Part IV. Authenticated quantum communication has been already proved to relate to quantum verification. We expand this by proposing a quantum authentication protocol derived from [Fitzsimons and Kashefi, 2012] and discuss implications to verification with purely classical verifier. Connections between quantum security primitives, namely blindness - prover does not learn the computation -, and classical security are considered in Part V. We introduce a protocol where a client with restricted classical resources computes blindly a universal classical gate with the help of an untrusted server, by adding modest quantum capabilities to both client and server. This example of quantum-enhanced classical security we prove to be a task classically impossible.
The classical channel remote state preparation (ccRSP) is an important two-party primitive in quantum cryptography. Alice (classical polynomial-time) and Bob (quantum polynomial-time) exchange polynomial rounds of classical messages, and Bob finally gets random single-qubit states while Alice finally gets classical descriptions of the states. In [T. Morimae, arXiv:2003.10712], an information-theoretically-sound non-interactive protocol for the verification of quantum computing was proposed. The verifier of the protocol is classical, but the trusted center is assumed that sends random single-qubit states to the prover and their classical descriptions to the verifier. If the trusted center can be replaced with a ccRSP protocol while keeping the information-theoretical soundness, an information-theoretically-sound classical verification of quantum computing is possible, which solves the long-standing open problem. In this paper, we show that it is not the case unless BQP is contained in MA. We also consider a general verification protocol where the verifier or the trusted center first sends quantum states to the prover, and then the prover and the verifier exchange a constant round of classical messages. We show that the first quantum message transmission cannot be replaced with an (even approximate) ccRSP protocol while keeping the information-theoretical soundness unless BQP is contained in AM. We finally study the verification with the computational soundness. We show that if a ccRSP protocol satisfies a certain condition even against any quantum polynomial-time malicious prover, the replacement of the trusted center with the ccRSP protocol realizes a computationally-sound classical verification of quantum computing. The condition is weaker than the verifiability of the ccRSP.
The importance of being able to verify quantum computation delegated to remote servers increases with recent development of quantum technologies. In some of the proposed protocols for this task, a client delegates her quantum computation to non-communicating servers. The fact that the servers do not communicate is not physically justified and it is essential for the proof of security of such protocols. For the best of our knowledge, we present in this work the first verifiable delegation scheme where a classical client delegates her quantum computation to two entangled servers that are allowed to communicate, but respecting the plausible assumption that information cannot be propagated faster than speed of light. We achieve this result by proposing the first one-round two-prover game for the Local Hamiltonian problem where provers only need polynomial time quantum computation and access to copies of the groundstate of the Hamiltonian.
Blind quantum computing (BQC) allows a client to have a server carry out a quantum computation for them such that the client's input, output, and computation remain private. A desirable property for any BQC protocol is verification, whereby the client can verify with high probability whether the server has followed the instructions of the protocol or if there has been some deviation resulting in a corrupted output state. A verifiable BQC protocol can be viewed as an interactive proof system leading to consequences for complexity theory. We previously proposed [A. Broadbent, J. Fitzsimons, and E. Kashefi, in Proceedings of the 50th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, Atlanta, 2009 (IEEE, Piscataway, 2009), p. 517] a universal and unconditionally secure BQC scheme where the client only needs to be able to prepare single qubits in separable states randomly chosen from a finite set and send them to the server, who has the balance of the required quantum computational resources. In this paper we extend that protocol with additional functionality allowing blind computational basis measurements, which we use to construct another verifiable BQC protocol based on a different class of resource states. We rigorously prove that the probability of failing to detect an incorrect output is exponentially small in a security parameter, while resource overhead remains polynomial in this parameter. This resource state allows entangling gates to be performed between arbitrary pairs of logical qubits with only constant overhead. This is a significant improvement on the original scheme, which required that all computations to be performed must first be put into a nearest-neighbor form, incurring linear overhead in the number of qubits. Such an improvement has important consequences for efficiency and fault-tolerance thresholds.