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.
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 f-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 f-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 f-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 f-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.
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.
We initiate a systematic treatment of the communication complexity of conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS), where two parties want to disclose a secret to a third party if and only if their respective inputs satisfy some predicate. We present a general upper bound and the first non-trivial lower bounds for conditional disclosure of secrets. Moreover, we achieve tight lower bounds for many interesting setting of parameters for CDS with linear reconstruction, the latter being a requirement in the application to attribute-based encryption. In particular, our lower bounds explain the trade-off between ciphertext and secret key sizes of several existing attribute-based encryption schemes based on the dual system methodology.
A non-local quantum computation (NLQC) replaces an interaction between two quantum systems with a single simultaneous round of communication and shared entanglement. We study two classes of NLQC, f-routing and f-BB84, which are of relevance to classical information theoretic cryptography and quantum position-verification. We give the first non-trivial lower bounds on entanglement in both settings, but are restricted to lower bounding protocols with perfect correctness. Within this setting, we give a lower bound on the Schmidt rank of any entangled state that completes these tasks for a given function f(x,y) in terms of the rank of a matrix g(x,y) whose entries are zero when f(x,y)=0, and strictly positive otherwise. This also leads to a lower bound on the Schmidt rank in terms of the non-deterministic quantum communication complexity of f(x,y). Because of a relationship between f-routing and the conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) primitive studied in information theoretic cryptography, we obtain a new technique for lower bounding the randomness complexity of CDS.
Information-theoretic cryptography is full of open problems with a communication-complexity flavor. We will describe several such problems that arise in the study of private information retrieval, secure multi-party computation, secret sharing, private simultaneous messages (PSM) and conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS). In all these cases, there is a huge (exponential) gap between the best known upper and lower bounds. We will also describe the connections between these problems, some old and some new.
A non-local quantum computation (NLQC) replaces an interaction between two quantum systems with a single simultaneous round of communication and shared entanglement. We study two classes of NLQC, f-routing and f-BB84, which are of relevance to classical information theoretic cryptography and quantum position-verification. We give the first non-trivial lower bounds on entanglement in both settings, but are restricted to lower bounding protocols with perfect correctness. Within this setting, we give a lower bound on the Schmidt rank of any entangled state that completes these tasks for a given function f(x,y) in terms of the rank of a matrix g(x,y) whose entries are zero when f(x,y) = 0, and strictly positive otherwise. This also leads to a lower bound on the Schmidt rank in terms of the non-deterministic quantum communication complexity of f(x,y). Because of a relationship between f-routing and the conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) primitive studied in information theoretic cryptography, we obtain a new technique for lower bounding the randomness complexity of CDS.