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arXiv:2404.14491 · Quantum

Conditional disclosure of secrets with quantum resources

Vahid R. Asadi, Kohdai Kuroiwa, Debbie Leung, Alex May, Sabrina Pasterski, Chris Waddell

Published Oct 16, 2025• 2 citations
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Abstract

The conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) primitive is among the simplest cryptographic settings in which to study the relationship between communication, randomness, and security. CDS involves two parties, Alice and Bob, who do not communicate but who wish to reveal a secret z to a referee if and only if a Boolean function f has f ( x , y ) = 1 . Alice knows x , z , Bob knows y , and the referee knows x , y . Recently, a quantum analogue of this primitive called CDQS was defined and related to f -routing, a task studied in the context of quantum position-verification. CDQS has the same inputs, outputs, and communication pattern as CDS but allows the use of shared entanglement and quantum messages. We initiate the systematic study of CDQS, with the aim of better understanding the relationship between privacy and quantum resources in the information theoretic setting. We begin by looking for quantum analogues of results already established in the classical CDS literature. Doing so we establish a number of basic properties of CDQS, including lower bounds on entanglement and communication stated in terms of measures of communication complexity. Because of the close relationship to the f -routing position-verification scheme, our results have relevance to the security of these schemes.

DOI
10.22331/q-2025-10-16-1885

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The conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) primitive is among the simplest cryptographic settings in which to study the relationship between communication, randomness, and security. CDS involves two parties, Alice and Bob, who do not communicate but who wish to reveal a secret z to a referee if and only if a Boolean function f has f ( x , y ) = 1 . Alice knows x , z , Bob knows y , and the referee knows x , y . Recently, a quantum analogue of this primitive called CDQS was defined and related to f -routing, a task studied in the context of quantum position-verification. CDQS has the same inputs, outputs, and communication pattern as CDS but allows the use of shared entanglement and quantum messages. We initiate the systematic study of CDQS, with the aim of better understanding the relationship between privacy and quantum resources in the information theoretic setting. We begin by looking for quantum analogues of results already established in the classical CDS literature. Doing so we establish a number of basic properties of CDQS, including lower bounds on entanglement and communication stated in terms of measures of communication complexity. Because of the close relationship to the f -routing position-verification scheme, our results have relevance to the security of these schemes.
The conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) setting is among the most basic primitives studied in information-theoretic cryptography. Motivated by a connection to non-local quantum computation and position-based cryptography, CDS with quantum resources has recently been considered. Here, we study the differences between quantum and classical CDS, with the aims of clarifying the power of quantum resources in information-theoretic cryptography. We establish the following results:1) We prove a Ω ( log ⁡ R 0 , A → B ( f ) + log ⁡ R 0 , B → A ( f ) ) lower bound on quantum CDS where R 0 , A → B ( f ) is the classical one-way communication complexity with perfect correctness.2) We prove a lower bound on quantum CDS in terms of two round, public coin, two-prover interactive proofs.3) For perfectly correct CDS, we give a separation for a promise version of the not-equals function, showing a quantum upper bound of O ( log ⁡ n ) and classical lower bound of Ω ( n ) .4) We give a logarithmic upper bound for quantum CDS on forrelation, while the best known classical algorithm is linear. We interpret this as preliminary evidence that classical and quantum CDS are separated even with correctness and security error allowed.We also give a separation for classical and quantum private simultaneous message passing for a partial function, improving on an earlier relational separation. Our results use novel combinations of techniques from non-local quantum computation and communication complexity.
New lower bounds for CDS and fff-routing
Understanding the entanglement cost of non-local quantum computation (NLQC) is relevant to complexity theory, cryptography, quantum gravity, and other areas. A central special case is fff-routing, motivated in part by quantum position verification. Proving lower bounds on its entanglement cost in the fully robust setting has been a major open problem in NLQC. Motivated by this problem, we establish two related lower bounds. First, we study the shared-randomness cost of robust conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS). The connection between CDS and fff-routing established by Allerstorfer et al. (Quantum 2024) makes understanding the randomness complexity of robust CDS a natural step toward lower bounds for the fully robust routing problem. We show that the shared-randomness cost of robust CDS is lower bounded by the logarithm of deterministic SMP communication complexity, even when communication and private randomness are unrestricted. Our lower bound is tight for the equality function. Second, we consider one-sided-perfect fff-routing, in which the protocol is exact on one input class and has constant error on the other. By exploiting the positivity of the low-rank matrix in the method of Asadi, Culf, and May (ITCS 2025), we derive a lower bound on the entanglement cost in terms of sign rank. In particular, this yields a linear lower bound on the entanglement cost of routing for the inner-product function in both one-sided-perfect settings, matching the known upper bound.
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.
In the conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) problem, Alice and Bob (each holds an input and a common secret) wish to disclose, as efficiently as possible, the secret to Carol if and only if their inputs satisfy some function. The capacity of CDS is the maximum number of bits of the secret that can be securely disclosed per bit of total communication. We characterize the necessary and sufficient condition for the extreme case where the capacity of CDS is the highest and is equal to 1/2. For the simplest instance where the capacity is smaller than 1/2, we show that the linear capacity is 2/5.
In the conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) problem, Alice and Bob (each holds an input and a common secret) wish to disclose, as efficiently as possible, the secret to Carol if and only if their inputs satisfy some function. The capacity of CDS is the maximum number of bits of the secret that can be securely disclosed per bit of total communication. We characterize the necessary and sufficient condition for the extreme case where the capacity of CDS is the highest and is equal to1/21/21/2. For the simplest instance where the capacity is smaller than1/21/21/2, we show that the linear capacity is2/52/52/5.