We establish a strong monogamy-of-entanglement property for subspace coset states, which are uniform superpositions of vectors in a linear subspace of F2n to which has been applied a quantum one-time pad. This property was conjectured recently by [Coladangelo, Liu, Liu, and Zhandry, Crypto'21] and shown to have applications to unclonable decryption and copy-protection of pseudorandom functions. We present two proofs, one which directly follows the method of the original paper and the other which uses an observation from [Vidick and Zhang, Eurocrypt'20] to reduce the analysis to a simpler monogamy game based on BB'84 states. Both proofs ultimately rely on the same proof technique, introduced in [Tomamichel, Fehr, Kaniewski and Wehner, New Journal of Physics '13].
By leveraging the no-cloning principle of quantum mechanics, unclonable cryptography enables us to achieve novel cryptographic protocols that are otherwise impossible classically. Two most notable examples of unclonable cryptography are quantum copy-protection and unclonable encryption. Most known constructions rely on the quantum random oracle model (as opposed to the plain model), in which all parties have access in superposition to a powerful random oracle. Despite receiving a lot of attention in recent years, two important open questions still remain: copy-protection of point functions in the plain model, which is usually considered as feasibility demonstration, and unclonable encryption with unclonable indistinguishability security in the plain model. A core ingredient of these protocols is the so-called monogamy-of-entanglement property. Such games allow quantifying the correlations between the outcomes of multiple non-communicating parties sharing entanglement in a particular context. Specifically, we define the games between a challenger and three players in which the first player is asked to split and share a quantum state between the two others, who are then simultaneously asked a question and need to output the correct answer. In this work, by relying on previous works of Coladangelo, Liu, Liu, and Zhandry (Crypto'21) and Culf and Vidick (Quantum'22), we establish a new monogamy-of-entanglement property for subspace coset states, which allows us to progress towards the aforementioned goals. However, it is not sufficient on its own, and we present two conjectures that would allow first to show that copy-protection of point functions exists in the plain model, with different challenge distributions (including arguably the most natural ones), and then that unclonable encryption with unclonable indistinguishability security exists in the plain model. We believe that our new monogamy-of-entanglement to be of independent interest, and it could be useful in other applications as well. To highlight this last point, we leverage our new monogamy-of-entanglement property to show the existence of a tokenized signature scheme with a new security definition, called unclonable unforgeability.
A main application of quantum information in cryptography is copy-protection, where we encode a functionality (such as a decryption key or software) into a reusable quantum state so that it cannot be split into two adversaries (called freeloaders) that both remain useful.
Previous works have only shown security for independently sampled challenges for the two adversaries. A competing natural security notion is identical-challenge security where the adversaries receive the same challenge. This notion has many real-life applications and connections to other fundamental primitives such as unclonable bits (i.e. unclonable encryption) and unclonable lockboxes (i.e. copy-protection of point functions). Despite its importance and numerous attempts, achieving identical-challenge security in the plain model has remained open.
We first make progress on the definitional foundations of copy-protection by introducing natural copy-protection security definitions that imply the previous ones (including identical-challenge security) and better capture the security intuitions and real-life use cases; and we also characterize the relationship between the previous definitions. Then, we show how to achieve in the plain model our new stronger definitions for copy-protection of general classes of functionalities. In particular, we resolve the long-standing open questions of copy-protection of point functions, copy-protection of compute-and-compare programs, and identical-challenge secure copy-protection of decryption keys and all puncturable functionalities.
Our technical core is a new decisional monogamy-of-entanglement result for coset states, which both allows us to achieve our new results, and also significantly simplifies and unifies unclonable cryptography proofs. We believe this will have further applications and may be of independent interest.
By leveraging the no-cloning principle of quantum mechanics, unclonable cryptography enables us to achieve novel cryptographic protocols that are otherwise impossible classically. Two most notable examples of unclonable cryptography are copy-protection (CP) and unclonable encryption (UE). Most known constructions rely on the QROM (as opposed to the plain model). Despite receiving a lot of attention in recent years, two important open questions still remain: CP for point functions in the plain model, which is usually considered as feasibility demonstration, and UE with unclonable indistinguishability security in the plain model. A core ingredient of these protocols is the so-called monogamy-of-entanglement (MoE) property. Such games allow quantifying the correlations between the outcomes of multiple non-communicating parties sharing entanglement in a particular context. Specifically, we define the games between a challenger and three players in which the first player is asked to split and share a quantum state between the two others, who are then simultaneously asked a question and need to output the correct answer. In this work, by relying on previous works [CLLZ21, CV22], we establish a new MoE property for subspace coset states, which allows us to progress towards the aforementioned goals. However, it is not sufficient on its own, and we present two conjectures that would allow first to show that CP of point functions exists in the plain model, with different challenge distributions, and then that UE with unclonable indistinguishability security exists in the plain model. We believe that our new MoE to be of independent interest, and it could be useful in other applications as well. To highlight this last point, we leverage our new MoE property to show the existence of a tokenized signature scheme with a new security definition, called unclonable unforgeability.
In a monogamy-of-entanglement (MoE) game, two players who do not communicate try to simultaneously guess a referee's measurement outcome on a shared quantum state they prepared. We study the prototypical example of a game where the referee measures in either the computational or Hadamard basis and informs the players of her choice. We show that this game satisfies a rigidity property similar to what is known for some nonlocal games. That is, in order to win optimally, the players' strategy must be of a specific form, namely a convex combination of four unentangled optimal strategies generated by the Breidbart state. We extend this to show that strategies that win near-optimally must also be near an optimal state of this form. We also show rigidity for multiple copies of the game played in parallel. We give three applications: (1) We construct for the first time a weak string erasure (WSE) scheme where the security does not rely on limitations on the parties' hardware. Instead, we add a prover, which enables security via the rigidity of this MoE game. (2) We show that the WSE scheme can be used to achieve bit commitment in a model where it is impossible classically. (3) We achieve everlasting-secure randomness expansion in the model of trusted but leaky measurement and untrusted preparation and measurements by two isolated devices, while relying only on the temporary assumption of pseudorandom functions. This achieves randomness expansion without the need for shared entanglement.
In this work, we consider "decision" variants of a monogamy-of-entanglement game by Tomamichel, Fehr, Kaniewski, and Wehner [New Journal of Physics '13]. In its original "search" variant, Alice prepares a (possibly entangled) state on registers
ABC; register
A, consisting of
n qubits, is sent to a Referee, while
B and
C are sent to Bob and Charlie; the Referee then measures each qubit in the standard or Hadamard basis (chosen uniformly at random). The basis choices are sent to Bob and Charlie, whose goal is to simultaneously guess the Referee's
n-bit outcome string
x. Tomamichel et al. show that the optimal winning probability is
cos2n(8π), following a perfect parallel repetition theorem. We consider the following "decision" variants of this game: - Variant 1, "XOR repetition": Bob and Charlie's goal is to guess the XOR of all the bits of
x. Ananth et al. [Asiacrypt '24] conjectured that the optimal advantage over random guessing decays exponentially in
n. Surprisingly, we show that this conjecture is false, and, in fact, there is no decay at all: there exists a strategy that wins with probability
cos2(8π)≈0.85 for any
n. - Variant 2, "Goldreich-Levin": The Referee additionally samples a uniformly random
n-bit string
r that is sent to Bob and Charlie along with the basis choices. Their goal is to guess the parity of
r⋅x. We show that the optimal advantage over random guessing decays exponentially in
n for the restricted class of adversaries that do not share entanglement. A similar result was already shown by Champion et al. and Çakan et al.; we give a more direct proof. Additionally, we put forward a reasonably concrete conjecture that is equivalent to exponential decay for general adversaries.
Unlike classical correlation, quantum entanglement cannot be freely shared among many parties. This restricted shareability of entanglement among multi-party systems is known as monogamy of entanglement, which is one of the most fundamental properties of entanglement. Here, we summarize recent theoretical progress in the field of monogamy of entanglement. We firstly review the standard CKW-type monogamy inequalities in terms of various entanglement measures. In particular, the squashed entanglement and one-way distillable entanglement are monogamous for arbitrary dimensional systems. We then introduce some generalized version of monogamy inequalities which extend and sharpen the traditional ones. We also consider the dual polygamy inequalities for multi-party systems. Moreover, we present two new definitions to define monogamy of entanglement. Finally, some challenges and future directions for monogamy of entanglement are highlighted.