The authors present a composably secure protocol allowing $n$ parties to test an entanglement generation resource controlled by a possibly dishonest party. The test requires only local quantum operations and authenticated classical communication once a state is shared among them. The composability ensures that the protocol can be used multiple times in a row or as a subroutine in any bigger protocol without threatening the overall security.
The authors present a composably secure protocol allowing n parties to test an entanglement generation resource controlled by a possibly dishonest party. The test requires only local quantum operations and authenticated classical communication once a state is shared among them. The composability ensures that the protocol can be used multiple times in a row or as a subroutine in any bigger protocol without threatening the overall security.
Future quantum information networks will consist of quantum and classical agents, who have the ability to communicate in a variety of ways with trusted and untrusted parties and securely delegate computational tasks to untrusted large-scale quantum computing servers. Multipartite quantum entanglement is a fundamental resource for such a network and, hence, it is imperative to study the possibility of verifying a multipartite entanglement source in a way that is efficient and provides strong guarantees even in the presence of multiple dishonest parties. In this Letter, we show how an agent of a quantum network can perform a distributed verification of a source creating multipartite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states with minimal resources, which is, nevertheless, resistant against any number of dishonest parties. Moreover, we provide a tight tradeoff between the level of security and the distance between the state produced by the source and the ideal GHZ state. Last, by adding the resource of a trusted common random source, we can further provide security guarantees for all honest parties in the quantum network simultaneously.
Multipartite entangled states are a fundamental resource for a wide range of quantum information processing tasks. In particular, in quantum networks, it is essential for the parties involved to be able to verify if entanglement is present before they carry out a given distributed task. Here we design and experimentally demonstrate a protocol that allows any party in a network to check if a source is distributing a genuinely multipartite entangled state, even in the presence of untrusted parties. The protocol remains secure against dishonest behaviour of the source and other parties, including the use of system imperfections to their advantage. We demonstrate the verification protocol in a three- and four-party setting using polarization-entangled photons, highlighting its potential for realistic photonic quantum communication and networking applications.
Graph state verification protocols allow multiple parties to share a graph state while checking that the state is honestly prepared, even in the presence of malicious parties. Since graph states are the starting point of numerous quantum protocols, it is crucial to ensure that graph state verification protocols can safely be composed with other protocols, this property being known as composable security. Previous works [YDK21] conjectured that such a property could not be proven within the abstract cryptography framework: we disprove this conjecture by showing that all graph state verification protocols can be turned into a composably secure protocol with respect to the natural functionality for graph state preparation. Moreover, we show that any unchanged graph state verification protocols can also be considered as composably secure for a slightly different, yet useful, functionality. Finally, we show that these two results are optimal, in the sense that any such generic result, considering arbitrary black-box protocols, must either modify the protocol or consider a different functionality. Along the way, we show a protocol to generalize entanglement swapping to arbitrary graph states that might be of independent interest.
Graph states are a large class of multipartite entangled quantum states that form the basis of schemes for quantum computation, communication, error correction, metrology, and more. In this work, we consider verification of graph states generated by an untrusted source and shared between a network of possibly dishonest parties. This has implications in certifying the application of graph states for various distributed tasks. We present a protocol which is globally efficient for a large family of useful graph states, including cluster states, GHZ states, cycle graph states, and more. For general graph states, efficiency with respect to the security parameter is maintained, though there is a cost increase with the size of the graph state. The protocols are practical, requiring only multiple copies of the graph state, local measurements, and classical communication.
Secret sharing is a multiparty cryptographic primitive that can be applied to a network of partially distrustful parties for encrypting data that is both sensitive (it must remain secure) and important (it must not be lost or destroyed).When sharing classical secrets (as opposed to quantum states), one can distinguish between protocols that leverage bipartite quantum key distribution (QKD) and those that exploit multipartite entanglement.The latter class are known to be vulnerable to so-called participant attacks and, while progress has been made recently, there is currently no analysis that quantifies their performance in the composable, finite-size regime, which has become the gold standard for QKD security.Given this-and the fact that distributing multipartite entanglement is typically challenging-one might well ask is there any virtue in pursuing multipartite entanglement-based schemes?Here, we answer this question in the affirmative for a class of secret-sharing protocols based on continuous-variable graph states.We establish security in a composable framework and identify a network topology, specifically a bottleneck network of lossy channels, and parameter regimes within the reach of present-day experiments for which a multipartite scheme outperforms the corresponding QKD-based method in the asymptotic and finite-size setting.Finally, we establish experimental parameters where the multipartite schemes outperform any possible QKD-based protocol.This is one of the first concrete compelling examples of multipartite entangled resources achieving a genuine advantage over point-to-point protocols for quantum communication and represents a rigorous, operational benchmark to assess the usefulness of such resources.
Message authentication is a cryptographic task that allows the receiver to reject a message that is forged or has been tampered with. A protocol to authenticate quantum messages was proposed by Barnum, Crépeau, Gottesman, Tapp, and Smith [1] and stand-alone security was proved. Here, we are concerned with universal composable security (which requires a protocol to be essentially indistinguishable from the ideal functionality and ensures overall security when the protocol is part of any larger scheme). We show that the protocol in [1] is universal composably secure, and that most of the required key can be reused with universal composable security.