We present a robust and composable device-independent (DI) quantum protocol between two parties for oblivious transfer (OT) using Magic Square devices in the bounded storage model in which the (honest and cheating) devices and parties have no long-term quantum memory. After a fixed constant (real-world) time interval, referred to as DELAY, the quantum states decohere completely. The adversary (cheating party), with full control over the devices, is allowed joint (non-IID) quantum operations on the devices, and there are no time and space complexity bounds placed on its powers. The running time of the honest parties is polylog(λ) (where λ is the security parameter). Our protocol has negligible (in λ) correctness and security errors and can be implemented in the NISQ (Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum) era. By robustness, we mean that our protocol is correct even when devices are slightly off (by a small constant) from their ideal specification. This is an important property since small manufacturing errors in the real-world devices are inevitable. Our protocol is sequentially composable and, hence, can be used as a building block to construct larger protocols (including DI bit-commitment and DI secure multi-party computation) while still preserving correctness and security guarantees. None of the known DI protocols for OT in the literature are robust and secure against joint quantum attacks. This was a major open question in device-independent two-party distrustful cryptography, which we resolve. We prove a parallel repetition theorem for a certain class of entangled games with a hybrid (quantum-classical) strategy to show the security of our protocol. The hybrid strategy helps to incorporate DELAY in our protocol. This parallel repetition theorem is a main technical contribution of our work.
We present a robust and composable device-independent (DI) quantum protocol between two parties for oblivious transfer (OT) using Magic Square devices in the bounded storage model in which the (honest and cheating) devices and parties have no long-term quantum memory. After a fixed constant (real-world) time interval, referred to as DELAY, the quantum states decohere completely. The adversary (cheating party), with full control over the devices, is allowed joint (non-IID) quantum operations on the devices, and there are no time and space complexity bounds placed on its powers. The running time of the honest parties is polylog(λ) (where λ is the security parameter). Our protocol has negligible (in λ) correctness and security errors and can be implemented in the NISQ (Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum) era. By robustness, we mean that our protocol is correct even when devices are slightly off (by a small constant) from their ideal specification. This is an important property since small manufacturing errors in the real-world devices are inevitable. Our protocol is sequentially composable and, hence, can be used as a building block to construct larger protocols (including DI bit-commitment and DI secure multi-party computation) while still preserving correctness and security guarantees. None of the known DI protocols for OT in the literature are robust and secure against joint quantum attacks. This was a major open question in device-independent two-party distrustful cryptography, which we resolve. We prove a parallel repetition theorem for a certain class of entangled games with a hybrid (quantum-classical) strategy to show the security of our protocol. The hybrid strategy helps to incorporate DELAY in our protocol. This parallel repetition theorem is a main technical contribution of our work.
Assuming post-quantum one-way functions, we construct device-independent (DI) oblivious transfer (OT) and bit commitment: honest parties use only trusted classical computation to operate untrusted quantum devices, which may share arbitrary entanglement and behave non-IID. Security is simulation-based against quantum polynomial-time adversaries and composes sequentially with efficient simulators. One protocol skeleton serves both, in two regimes. With isolated laboratories and coordinate-local measurements in the honest receiver's device, it tolerates a constant rate of honest-device faults. With polylogarithmically many qubits of adaptive leakage between the laboratories and arbitrary joint measurements, it tolerates an inverse-polylogarithmic rate. Each elementary DI call uses a fresh, isolated batch of polylogarithmically many device coordinates, and total device use in the compiled OT protocol is polynomial. The commitment has efficient simulators against both parties and yields DI coin tossing with abort.
Because OT is complete for secure computation, the construction yields a DI protocol, with abort, for every efficiently computable classical functionality on a fixed number of parties, secure against static corruption of any proper subset of them.
The commitment's extractor changes a public parity relation through classical equivocation and leaves the device execution, hence its leakage, unchanged. A commit-and-prove functionality, disjoint audits, and an affine consistency check link the certified correlations to ideal OT. Sender security rests on a selector-aware parallel-repetition bound for the Magic Square game, which we derive from the two-round threshold theorem of Kundu and Tan.
The noisy-storage model of quantum cryptography allows for information-theoretically secure two-party computation based on the assumption that a cheating user has at most access to an imperfect, noisy quantum memory, whereas the honest users do not need a quantum memory at all. In general, the more noisy the quantum memory of the cheating user, the more secure the implementation of oblivious transfer, which is a primitive that allows universal secure two-party and multiparty computation. For experimental implementations of oblivious transfer, one has to consider that also the devices held by the honest users are lossy and noisy, and error correction needs to be applied to correct these trusted errors. The latter are expected to reduce the security of the protocol, since a cheating user may hide themselves in the trusted noise. Here we leverage entropic uncertainty relations to derive tight bounds on the security of oblivious transfer with a trusted and untrusted noise. In particular, we discuss noisy storage and bounded storage, with independent and correlated noise.
The goal of two-party cryptography is to enable two parties, Alice and Bob, to solve common tasks without the need for mutual trust. Examples of such tasks are private access to a database, and secure identification. Quantum communication enables security for all of these problems in the noisy-storage model by sending more signals than the adversary can store in a certain time frame. Here, we initiate the study of device-independent (DI) protocols for two-party cryptography in the noisy-storage model. Specifically, we present a relatively easy to implement protocol for a cryptographic building block known as weak string erasure and prove its security even if the devices used in the protocol are prepared by the dishonest party. DI two-party cryptography is made challenging by the fact that Alice and Bob do not trust each other, which requires new techniques to establish security. We fully analyse the case of memoryless devices (for which sequential attacks are optimal) and the case of sequential attacks for arbitrary devices. The key ingredient of the proof, which might be of independent interest, is an explicit (and tight) relation between the violation of the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality observed by Alice and Bob and uncertainty generated by Alice against Bob who is forced to measure his system before finding out Alice's setting (guessing with postmeasurement information). In particular, we show that security is possible for arbitrarily small violation.
We consider the implementation of two-party cryptographic primitives based on the sole assumption that no large-scale reliable quantum storage is available to the cheating party. We construct novel protocols for oblivious transfer and bit commitment, and prove that realistic noise levels provide security even against the most general attack. Such unconditional results were previously only known in the so-called bounded-storage model which is a special case of our setting. Our protocols can be implemented with present-day hardware used for quantum key distribution. In particular, no quantum storage is required for the honest parties.
Among the most studied tasks in Quantum Cryptography one can find Bit Commitment (BC) and Oblivious Transfer (OT), two central cryptographic primitives. In this paper we propose for the first time protocols for these tasks in the measurement-device independent (MDI) settings and analyze their security. We analyze two different cases: first we assume the parties have access to perfect single photon sources (but still in the presence of noise and losses), and second we assume that they only have imperfect single photon sources. In the first case we propose a protocol for both BC and OT and prove their security in the Noisy Quantum Storage model. Interestingly, in the case where honest parties do not have access to perfect single photon sources, we find that BC is still possible, but that it is "more difficult" to get a secure protocol for OT: We show that there is a whole class of protocols that cannot be secure. All our security analyses are done in the finite round regime.
We study the task of encryption with certified deletion (ECD) introduced by Broadbent and Islam (2020), but in a device-independent setting: we show that it is possible to achieve this task even when the honest parties do not trust their quantum devices. Moreover, we define security for the ECD task in a composable manner and show that our ECD protocol satisfies conditions that lead to composable security. Our protocol is based on device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD), and in particular the parallel DIQKD protocol based on the magic square non-local game, given by Jain, Miller and Shi (2020). To achieve certified deletion, we use a property of the magic square game observed by Fu and Miller (2018), namely that a two-round variant of the game can be used to certify deletion of a single random bit. In order to achieve certified deletion security for arbitrarily long messages from this property, we prove a parallel repetition theorem for two-round non-local games, which may be of independent interest.