We re-visit Unclonable Encryption as introduced by Gottesman in 2003. We look at the combination of Unclonable Encryption and Key Recycling, while aiming for low communication complexity and high rate. We introduce a qubit-based prepare-and-measure Unclonable Encryption scheme with re-usable keys. Our scheme consists of a single transmission by Alice and a single classical feedback bit from Bob. The transmission from Alice to Bob consists entirely of qubits. The rate, defined as the message length divided by the number of qubits, is higher than what can be achieved using Gottesman's scheme. We provide a security proof based on the diamond norm distance, taking noise into account.
We re-visit Unclonable Encryption as introduced by Gottesman in 2003. We look at the combination of Unclonable Encryption and Key Recycling, while aiming for low communication complexity and high rate. We introduce a qubit-based prepare-and-measure Unclonable Encryption scheme with re-usable keys. Our scheme consists of a single transmission by Alice and a single classical feedback bit from Bob. The transmission from Alice to Bob consists entirely of qubits. The rate, defined as the message length divided by the number of qubits, is higher than what can be achieved using Gottesman's scheme. We provide a security proof based on the diamond norm distance, taking noise into account.
We re-visit Unclonable Encryption as introduced by Gottesman in~2003 \cite{uncl}. We look at the combination of Unclonable Encryption and Key Recycling, while aiming for low communication complexity and high rate. We introduce a qubit-based prepare-and-measure Unclonable Encryption scheme with re-usable keys. Our scheme consists of a single transmission by Alice and a single classical feedback from Bob. The transmission from Alice to Bob consists entirely of qubits. The rate, defined as the message length divided by the number of qubits, is higher than what can be achieved using Gottesman's scheme~\cite{uncl}. We provide a security proof based on the diamond norm distance, taking noise into account.
Unclonable Encryption, introduced by Gottesman in 2003 [Quantum Inform. Comput. 3 (2003) 581], is a quantum protocol that guarantees the secrecy of a successfully transferred classical message even when all keys leak at a later time. We propose an Unclonable Encryption protocol with the additional property that the sender’s key material is allowed to leak even in the case of an unsuccessful run. This extra feature makes it possible to achieve secure quantum encryption even when one of the parties is unable to protect its keys against after-protocol theft. Such an asymmetry occurs e.g. in case of server–client scenarios, where the client device is resource constrained and/or located in a hostile environment. Our protocol makes use of a bidirectional quantum channel in a manner similar to the two-way protocol LM05 [Phys. Rev. Lett. 94 (2005) 140501]. Bob sends random qubit states to Alice. Alice flips the states in a way that depends on the message and a shared key, and sends the resulting states back to Bob. Bob recovers Alice’s message by measuring the flips. We prove that our protocol satisfies the definition of unclonable encryption and additionally that the message remains secure even if all of Alice’s keys leak after the protocol. Furthermore, we show that some of the key materials can be safely re-used. Our security proof is formulated in terms of diamond norms, which makes it composable, and allows for noisy quantum channels. We work out the details only for the asymptotics in the limit of long messages. As a side result, we construct a two-way QKD scheme with a high key rate. We show that its key rate is higher than the rate of the two-way QKD scheme LM05 proven by Beaudry et al. [Phys. Rev. A 88 (2013) 062302] for the case of independent channel noise.
We answer an open question about Quantum Key Recycling (QKR): Is it possible to put the message entirely in the qubits without increasing the number of qubits compared to existing QKR schemes? We show that this is indeed possible. We introduce a prepare-and-measure QKR protocol where the communication from Alice to Bob consists entirely of qubits. As usual, Bob responds with an authenticated one-bit accept/reject classical message. Compared to Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), QKR has reduced round complexity. Compared to previous qubit-based QKR protocols, our scheme has far less classical communication. We provide a security proof in the universal composability framework and find that the communication rate is asymptotically the same as for QKD with one-way postprocessing.
We give an unconditional construction of information-theoretically secure one-time private-key unclonable encryption for one-bit messages, with efficient encryption and decryption and exponentially small unclonable-indistinguishability advantage. Previous work by Bhattacharyya and Culf (Nature Physics, 2026) and Bhattacharyya, Broadbent, and Culf (arXiv:2603.08916) either only showed inverse-polynomial security loss or required inefficient encryption/decryption operations; we avoid both of these caveats.
Our scheme's key is a uniformly random non-identity phase-free Pauli on n qubits, and bit a is encrypted as a random (−1)a eigenstate of that Pauli. We prove that the probability that both receivers recover the bit is at most 1/2+O(2−n/2). By a lower bound due to Broadbent, Culf, and Rochette (arXiv:2510.00903), this is the best probability bound achievable with n-qubit ciphertexts while ensuring perfect correctness (up to the constant hidden in the O(⋅)).
Assuming an insecure quantum channel and an authenticated classical channel, we propose an unconditionally secure scheme for encrypting classical messages under a shared key, where attempts to eavesdrop the ciphertext can be detected. If no eavesdropping is detected, we can securely re-use the entire key for encrypting new messages. If eavesdropping is detected, we must discard a number of key bits corresponding to the length of the message, but can re-use almost all of the rest. We show this is essentially optimal. Thus, provided the adversary does not interfere (too much) with the quantum channel, we can securely send an arbitrary number of message bits, independently of the length of the initial key. Moreover, the key-recycling mechanism only requires one-bit feedback. While ordinary quantum key distribution with a classical one time pad could be used instead to obtain a similar functionality, this would need more rounds of interaction and more communication.
We give, to our knowledge, the first plain-model, one-time information-theoretically secure, efficient unclonable encryption scheme for one classical bit. Previous work by Bhattacharyya and Culf (Nature Physics, 2026) and Bhattacharyya, Broadbent, and Culf either only showed 1/poly(λ) security loss or required inefficient encryption/decryption operations. We avoid both of these caveats; in doing so, we obtain (to our knowledge) the first plain-model construction of many-time secure 1→2 unclonable encryption for arbitrary polynomial-length messages, assuming the existence of pseudorandom function-like states (Bartusek and Goldin).
The key is a uniformly random non-identity phase-free Pauli on n qubits, and bit a is encrypted as a random (−1)a eigenstate of that Pauli. The scheme is exponentially secure; we prove that the probability that both receivers recover the bit is at most 21+212n/(4n−1)=21+O(2−n/2). By a lower bound due to Broadbent, Culf, and Rochette, this is the best probability bound achievable with n-qubit ciphertexts (up to the constant hidden in the O(⋅)).
The main conceptual idea is to leverage, in a precise spectral sense, the balanced commutation-anticommutation structure of the Pauli group. The proof is intricate but completely elementary and makes use of standard spectral bound techniques. The main technical workhorse is a standalone linear-algebraic lemma that informally relates the positivity of two different operators, each capturing the intuition that if the two receivers can individually decrypt unusually often then they must also disagree often.
GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra found this proof in an extended conversation with the author and drafted a preliminary version of this paper. The author is fully accountable for the correctness of this paper.