The cryptographic task of position verification attempts to verify one party's location in spacetime by exploiting constraints on quantum information and relativistic causality. A popular verification scheme known as f -routing involves requiring the prover to redirect a quantum system based on the value of a Boolean function f . Cheating strategies for the f -routing scheme require the prover use pre-shared entanglement, and security of the scheme rests on assumptions about how much entanglement a prover can manipulate. Here, we give a new cheating strategy in which the quantum system is encoded into a secret-sharing scheme, and the authorization structure of the secret-sharing scheme is exploited to direct the system appropriately. This strategy completes the f -routing task using O(SPp(f)) EPR pairs, where SPp(f) is the minimal size of a span program over the field Zp computing f . This shows we can efficiently attack f -routing schemes whenever f is in the complexity class ModpL , after allowing for local pre-processing. The best earlier construction achieved the class L, which is believed to be strictly inside of ModpL . We also show that the size of a quantum secret sharing scheme with indicator function fI upper bounds entanglement cost of f -routing on the function fI .
The cryptographic task of position verification attempts to verify one party's location in spacetime by exploiting constraints on quantum information and relativistic causality. A popular verification scheme known as f -routing involves requiring the prover to redirect a quantum system based on the value of a Boolean function f . Cheating strategies for the f -routing scheme require the prover use pre-shared entanglement, and security of the scheme rests on assumptions about how much entanglement a prover can manipulate. Here, we give a new cheating strategy in which the quantum system is encoded into a secret-sharing scheme, and the authorization structure of the secret-sharing scheme is exploited to direct the system appropriately. This strategy completes the f -routing task using O(SPp(f)) EPR pairs, where SPp(f) is the minimal size of a span program over the field Zp computing f . This shows we can efficiently attack f -routing schemes whenever f is in the complexity class ModpL , after allowing for local pre-processing. The best earlier construction achieved the class L, which is believed to be strictly inside of ModpL . We also show that the size of a quantum secret sharing scheme with indicator function fI upper bounds entanglement cost of f -routing on the function fI .
A quantum position-verification scheme attempts to verify the spatial location of a prover. The prover is issued a challenge with quantum and classical inputs and must respond with appropriate timings. We consider two well-studied position-verification schemes known as f -routing and f -BB84. Both schemes require an honest prover to locally compute a classical function f of inputs of length n , and manipulate O(1) size quantum systems. We prove the number of quantum gates plus single qubit measurements needed to implement a function f is lower bounded linearly by the communication complexity of f in the simultaneous message passing model with shared entanglement. Taking f(x,y)=∑ixiyi to be the inner product function, we obtain a Ω(n) lower bound on quantum gates plus single qubit measurements. The scheme is feasible for a prover with linear classical resources and O(1) quantum resources, and secure against sub-linear quantum resources.
The goal of position-based cryptography is for an honest party to use her spatio-temporal position as her only credential in a cryptographic protocol. In particular, Position-Verification aims at verifying that a certain party, called the prover, holds a given position in spacetime. Such a protocol typically goes as follows: a set of verifiers will coordinate and send some challenge to the prover, and it is expected that only someone sitting in the supposed position of the prover can successfully pass the challenge. Two papers established that information theoretic security is not possible for Position-Based Quantum Cryptography (PBQC) protocols: neither in the classical [1], nor in the quantum [2] regime. More precisely, it is always possible for a coalition of adversaries to convince the verifiers, even if none of the adversary sits in the spatiotemporal region where the prover is supposed to be. At the same time, the best known attack strategies require the adversaries to share very entangled states: the attacks described in [2] are based on Vaidman’s protocol for nonlocal computation [3] and consist in the cheaters teleporting some quantum state back and forth, with a total cost in terms of required EPR pairs that scales double exponentially in n, the number of qubits involved in the PBQC protocol. Later, new generic attacks based on port-based teleportation[4] were proposed and require only exponential entanglement to succeed [5]. Finally, it is also know that a linear amount of entanglement is not su cient to break the PBQC protocol [5], [6]. A major open question in the field is to bridge the gap between lower and upper bounds: does there exist a protocol that requires exponentially many EPR pairs to break, or are all PBQC protocols insecure against a coalition of adversaries that shares polynomially many EPR pairs? While we do not settle this question in the present paper, we make some progress towards it by exhibiting new attack strategies with polynomial complexity against a large family of practical protocols. These attacks rely on teleportation gates and their precise complexity can be quantified with the notion of Cli↵ord hierarchy [7] of a quantum gate. We then introduce a new family of protocols, that generalizes a construction by Lau and Lo [8], which appears to be immune against these polynomialcomplexity attacks. Another main challenge is to determine whether there exist some PBQC protocol resistant to channel imperfections, either losses or noise, between the verifiers and
Quantum position-verification is a cryptographic task wherein a verifier attempts to establish the location in space of a prover. Recent experiments have implemented a well-studied class of position-verification schemes, known as the f-BB84 scenario, but their security under realistic loss and imperfect state preparation remains incompletely understood. We give a new lower bound on any attack on this scheme, in particular proving nearly-linear quantum gate lower bounds on the attacker, even when allowing the attacker to declare a transmission loss of up to 50%, allowing for the challenges prepared by the referee to be imperfect, and allowing the quantum messages used in the protocol to be arbitrarily slow. Our results are applicable to recent and upcoming experimental implementations of f-BB84, and in particular establish their security under a bounded quantum gate assumption on the attacker. The key ingredient is a tight analytic tradeoff for a lossy BB84 monogamy-of-entanglement game, valid without requiring the attackers' outputs to agree, which replaces observations previously made numerically.
Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) is a cheating strategy for position-verification schemes, and has appeared in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Here, we connect NLQC to the wider context of information theoretic cryptography by relating it to a number of other cryptographic primitives. We show one special case of NLQC, known as f -routing, is equivalent to the quantum analogue of the conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) primitive, where by equivalent we mean that a protocol for one task gives a protocol for the other with only small overhead in resource costs. We further consider another special case of position-verification, which we call coherent function evaluation (CFE), and show CFE protocols induce similarly efficient protocols for the private simultaneous message passing (PSM) scenario. By relating position-verification to these cryptographic primitives, a number of results in the information theoretic cryptography literature give new implications for NLQC, and vice versa. These include the first sub-exponential upper bounds on the worst case cost of f -routing of 2 O ( n log n ) entanglement, the first example of an efficient f -routing strategy for a problem believed to be outside P / p o l y , linear lower bounds on quantum resources for CDS in the quantum setting, linear lower bounds on communication cost of CFE, and efficient protocols for CDS in the quantum setting for functions that can be computed with quantum circuits of low T depth.
Recently, the problem of secure position-verification has been extensively analyzed in a formal notion where distant verifiers send encrypted challenge along with the decryption information to the prover. However, currently it is known that all the existing position-verification scheme are insecure and secure positioning is impossible. We propose here a different notion for position-verification where distant verifiers determine the actions of the prover through non-local correlations generated by local measurements at the provers site. The proposed scheme guarantees secure positioning even if the verifiers do not have any pre-shared data with the prover, position is the only credential of the prover. Our proposed scheme is secure in general and evades known quantum attacks based on instantaneous non-local computations in particular. The scheme enables verifiers to identify dishonest provers with very high probability , where n is the number of entangled pairs used.
While quantum position verification aims to certify a prover's location using quantum information, existing security definitions only guarantee that part of the successful adversarial party is in the claimed location. This leaves open the possibility that a distributed team of adversaries can jointly simulate a prover in a way that defeats the intended meaning of `being at a location' in position-based cryptography. We introduce stronger notions of position verification that we call quantum localization, which requires that there is a specified, unclonable state at the verified spacetime point-and that this state can be found nowhere else. We show that quantum localization leads naturally to a meaningful notion of trajectory verification, in which quantum information is verifiably tracked through space and time. We construct quantum localization and trajectory verification protocols using quantum anchor states, which generalize coset states from unclonable cryptography. The security of our schemes is proven in the classical oracle (i.e. ideal obfuscation) model, which can be heuristically instantiated in the plain model using post-quantum indistinguishability obfuscation. We also introduce and instantiate the concept of functionality localization, which guarantees that the adversary has the ability to compute a secret function at the verified spacetime point, and this function cannot be computed anywhere else. This raises the intriguing possibility of localizing computational capabilities in space and time. More broadly, we believe our notions of quantum localization and subsequent feasibility results provide stronger foundations for position-based cryptography. At a conceptual level, our results also explore the tight link between two fundamental notions in physics-location and information-thus serving as a natural foundation for cryptographic capabilities tied to physical spacetime.