Delegated quantum computing (DQC) enables limited clients to perform operations that are outside their capabilities remotely on a quantum server. Protocols for DQC are usually set up in the measurement-based quantum computation framework, as this allows for a natural separation of the different parts of the computation between the client and the server. The existing protocols achieve several desired properties, including the security of inputs, the blindness of computation and its verifiability, and have also recently been extended to the multiparty setting. Two approaches are followed in DQC that demand completely different operations on the clients' side. In one, the clients are able to prepare quantum states, in the other, the clients are able to measure them. In this work, we provide a novel stringent definition of the equivalence of protocols and show that these distinct DQC settings are, in fact, equivalent in this sense. We use the abstract cryptography framework to prove our claims and provide a novel technique that enables changing from one setting to the other. In this way, we demonstrate that both approaches can be used to perform tasks with the same properties. I.e., using our proposed techniques, we can always translate from one setting to the other. We finally use our results to propose a hybrid-client model for DQC.
Delegated quantum computing (DQC) enables limited clients to perform operations that are outside their capabilities remotely on a quantum server. Protocols for DQC are usually set up in the measurement-based quantum computation framework, as this allows for a natural separation of the different parts of the computation between the client and the server. The existing protocols achieve several desired properties, including the security of inputs, the blindness of computation and its verifiability, and have also recently been extended to the multiparty setting. Two approaches are followed in DQC that demand completely different operations on the clients' side. In one, the clients are able to prepare quantum states, in the other, the clients are able to measure them. In this work, we provide a novel stringent definition of the equivalence of protocols and show that these distinct DQC settings are, in fact, equivalent in this sense. We use the abstract cryptography framework to prove our claims and provide a novel technique that enables changing from one setting to the other. In this way, we demonstrate that both approaches can be used to perform tasks with the same properties. I.e., using our proposed techniques, we can always translate from one setting to the other. We finally use our results to propose a hybrid-client model for DQC.
Delegated quantum computing (DQC) allows clients with low quantum capabilities to outsource computations to a server hosting a quantum computer. This process is often envisioned within the measurement-based quantum computing framework, as it naturally facilitates blindness of inputs and computation. Hence, the overall process of setting up and conducting the computation encompasses a sequence of three stages: preparing the qubits, entangling the qubits to obtain the resource state, and measuring the qubits to run the computation. There are two primary approaches to distributing these stages between the client and the server that impose different constraints on cryptographic techniques and experimental implementations. In the prepare-and-send setting, the client prepares the qubits and sends them to the server, while in the receive-and-measure setting, the client receives the qubits from the server and measures them. Although these settings have been extensively studied independently, their interrelation and whether setting-dependent theoretical constraints are inevitable remain unclear. By implementing the key components of most DQC protocols in the respective missing setting, we provide a method to build prospective protocols in both settings simultaneously and to translate existing protocols from one setting into the other.
The rapid evolution of quantum technologies is likely to cause major shifts in the mainstream computing landscape. In order to fully reach their potential in a wide base accessible to any user, remote access of quantum computers and manipulation of data with strong privacy and integrity guarantees are essential. Consider a setting where a client having a fully classical computer wants to determine the result of some quantum computation, but lacks the necessary resources to perform the computation herself. She has access to a more powerful server which has quantum resources and can solve the problem and send the outcome back to the client. However, the client does not trust the powerful server, so she needs to find a way to hide her data. Therefore, the main question that arises is how can we guarantee the client’s privacy of the input and even the computation itself against the server possessing quantum computational capabilities. In the present thesis, we study this problem, denoted here as classical secure delegation of quantum computations (CSDQC) between a fully classical honest client and a quantum untrusted server. We focus on different models of security, analyzing the limitations and potential of each of the settings. Concretely, we first study the CSDQC problem under information-theoretic security. We analyse two categories of quantum computations, decision and sampling problems and in both cases we provide evidence indicating the impossibility of achieving information-theoretic security. Subsequently, we consider relaxing the security framework and specifically, we will analyze this task in the computational security setting (against quantum polynomial-time adversaries). As a result, in the second part of the thesis we put forward the remote state preparation as a key component that would allow us to achieve classical secure delegation of universal quantum computations. We present two protocols realizing the remote state preparation primitive assuming only a classical channel between client and server. The first candidate is shown to be secure in the honest-but-curious model, while the second candidate is proven secure against the server in the malicious setting. The security of both constructions relies on the hardness of the learning with errors problem. Finally, given the important role the remote state preparation plays not only in CSDQC, but also in other quantum communication protocols, we analyze its composable security to determine the privacy loss as a result of using remote state preparation as a sub-module in different protocols.
Blind quantum computing (BQC) allows a client to delegate quantum computations to a remote server without revealing the input, computation, or output. In addition to being blind, the client can sometimes also verify that the server has performed their instructions correctly, a property known as verifiability. A key part of realizing such verifiable BQC (VBQC) is choosing the design of the client device: many architectures have been proposed, each with different hardware requirements, security properties, and performance characteristics, making it difficult to identify which is most suitable for a given implementation. In this work, we present a comparative analysis of client architectures for VBQC with a matter-qubit server. We restrict our analysis to single-server, single-client protocols with information-theoretic security based on measurement-based quantum computation. We identify three main categories of client: emission-based, measurement-based, and rotation-based, each with multiple variants depending on how the client interacts with the server. We evaluate each across different dimensions: we compare guarantees of existing corresponding security proofs, we derive equations for the rate at which each client can execute a protocol, we provide an overview of each architecture's error behaviour, and discuss hardware cost and design considerations. Client architectures implementing measurement-based remote state preparation and reflection-based teleportation emerge as strong default candidates, but as the right choice remains context-dependent, we provide a framework for navigating considerations to guide the selection of the most suitable architecture for a given setting.
Abstract With the advent of cloud-based quantum computing, it has become vital to provide strong guarantees that computations delegated by clients to quantum service providers have been executed faithfully. Secure—blind and verifiable—delegated quantum computing (SDQC) has emerged as one of the key approaches to address this challenge, yet current protocols lack at least one of the following three ingredients: composability, noise-robustness and modularity. To tackle this question, our paper lays out the fundamental structure of SDQC protocols, namely mixing two components: the computation which the client would like the server to perform and tests that are designed to detect a server’s malicious behaviour. Using this abstraction, our main technical result is a set of sufficient conditions on these components which imply the security and noise-robustness of generic SDQC protocols in the composable Abstract Cryptography framework. This is done by establishing a correspondence between these security properties and the error-detection capabilities of the test computations. Changing the types of tests and how they are mixed with the client’s computation automatically yields new SDQC protocols with different security and noise-robustness capabilities. This approach thereby provides the desired modularity as our sufficient conditions on test computations simplify the steps required to prove the security of the protocols and allows to focus on the design and optimisation of test rounds to specific situations. We showcase this by systematising the search for improved SDQC protocols for bounded-error quantum polynomial-time ( BQP ) computations. The resulting protocols do not require more hardware on the server’s side than what is necessary to blindly delegate the computation without verification, and they outperform all previously known results.
We construct a multi-Client verifiable blind delegated quantum computing (VBDQC) protocol in which M classical Verifier Clients jointly delegate a public quantum circuit acting on their combined private inputs to two quantum-capable Provers sharing entanglement but having no direct communication channel. We begin by modifying the single-Client, entanglement-based CGJV Verifier-on-a-Leash protocol. We then prove simulator-based blind verifiability for the modified protocol using the abstract/constructive cryptography framework. We adapt the DFPR upward-reduction chain to the two-Prover setting, constructing a no-direct-communication simulator architecture. We then extend the CGJV protocol to M Clients using classical multiparty computation techniques, preserving the single-Client guarantees of completeness, soundness, and blindness while additionally guaranteeing input privacy between Clients. Security is analyzed under a threat model that allows a subset of Clients to collude with one but not both of the Provers, which do not communicate even after the protocol execution.
Blind quantum computing enables a client, who can only generate or measure single-qubit states, to delegate quantum computing to a remote quantum server in such a way that the input, output, and program are hidden from the server. It is an open problem whether a completely classical client can delegate quantum computing blindly (in the information theoretic sense). In this paper, we show that if a completely classical client can blindly delegate sampling of subuniversal models, such as the DQC1 model and the IQP model, then the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses to the third level. Our delegation protocol is the one where the client first sends a polynomial-length bit string to the server and then the server returns a single bit to the client. Generalizing the no-go result to more general setups is an open problem.