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arXiv:2507.03035

Error correction, authentication, and false acceptance, probabilities for communication over noisy quantum channels: converse upper bounds on the bit transmission rate

Pete Rigas

Published Jul 3, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We obtain strict upper bounds on the bit transmission rate for communication of Classical bit codewords over Quantum channels. Albeit previous arguments in arXiv: 1804.01797 which have demonstrated that lower bounds can be shown to hold for the bit transmission rate without the presence of significant noise over the channel shared by Alice and Bob for the purposes of encoding, decoding, transmission and authentication, the author suggests that upper bounding the bit transmission rate could be of use towards classifying paradoxical aspects of communication protocols, as well as constructing error correcting codes which are resilient to noise. The upper bound that is obtained in this work for the bit transmission rate, as a converse result, is dependent upon the natural logarithm of the size of each player's alphabet, as well as smaller alphabets, which can be leveraged for simultaneously realizing Quantum advantage for maximizing error correction and minimizing false acceptance. Crucially, the upper bound to the bit transmission rate is dependent upon a pruning procedure, which seeks to determine whether letters from player's alphabets can be removed so that prospective Quantum advantage, in order for Alice and Bob to implement error correction protocols with high probability, despite the fact that there is more noise over the channel between Alice and Bob in comparison to that between Bob and Eve.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2507.03035

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We obtain strict upper bounds on the bit transmission rate for communication of Classical bit codewords over Quantum channels. Albeit previous arguments in arXiv: 1804.01797 which have demonstrated that lower bounds can be shown to hold for the bit transmission rate without the presence of significant noise over the channel shared by Alice and Bob for the purposes of encoding, decoding, transmission and authentication, the author suggests that upper bounding the bit transmission rate could be of use towards classifying paradoxical aspects of communication protocols, as well as constructing error correcting codes which are resilient to noise. The upper bound that is obtained in this work for the bit transmission rate, as a converse result, is dependent upon the natural logarithm of the size of each player's alphabet, as well as smaller alphabets, which can be leveraged for simultaneously realizing Quantum advantage for maximizing error correction and minimizing false acceptance. Crucially, the upper bound to the bit transmission rate is dependent upon a pruning procedure, which seeks to determine whether letters from player's alphabets can be removed so that prospective Quantum advantage, in order for Alice and Bob to implement error correction protocols with high probability, despite the fact that there is more noise over the channel between Alice and Bob in comparison to that between Bob and Eve.
Characterizing secret communication over noisy quantum channels is an interesting problem from both a practical and theoretical perspective. Suppose Alice and Bob wish to communicate secret information so that an eavesdropper Eve will not suspect any type of encoded communication between the two. Classical or quantum cryptography will not suffice since it is always clear secret communication is taking place. Therefore Alice and Bob must execute what is known as a quantum steganographic protocol. Assuming Eve only has partial knowledge of the channel connecting Alice and Bob, we show that for the bit-flip and depolarizing channels Alice can use Eve's lack of knowledge of the channel parameter to encode quantum information steganographically. We give an explicit encoding procedure and calculate the rate at which Alice and Bob can communicate secretly. We also show that our encoding is optimal for nondegenerate quantum codes. We calculate the rate at which a secret key must be consumed. Finally, we discuss the possibility of steganographic communication over more general quantum channels and conjecture a general formula for the steganographic rate.
Steganography is the technique of hiding secret information by embedding it in a seemingly ``innocent'' message. We present protocols for hiding quantum information by disguising it as noise in a codeword of a quantum error-correcting code. The sender (Alice) swaps quantum information into the codeword and applies a random choice of unitary operation, drawing on a secret random key she shares with the receiver (Bob). Using the key, Bob can retrieve the information, but an eavesdropper (Eve) with the power to monitor the channel, but without the secret key, cannot distinguish the message from channel noise. We consider two types of protocols: one in which the hidden quantum information is stored locally in the codeword, and another in which it is embedded in the space of error syndromes. We analyze how difficult it is for Eve to detect the presence of secret messages, and estimate rates of steganographic communication and secret key consumption for specific protocols and examples of error channels. We consider both the case where there is no actual noise in the channel (so that all errors in the codeword result from the deliberate actions of Alice), and the case where the channel is noisy and not controlled by Alice and Bob.
We examine public broadcast, forward conceptual, and backward conceptual, Quantum channels in the context of communication protocols that are independent of secret keys. Given research directions of interest previously identified in arXiv: 1804.01797, besides converse upper bounds on the bit transmission rate obtained by the author in recent work (arXiv: 2507.03035), additional possibilities remain, including: (1) determining whether aspects of QKD dependent protocols can be incorporated into steps of QKD independent protocols; (2) whether there would be any amplification to the Quantum-classical performance gap that Alice and Bob can exploit towards prospective Quantum advantage; (3) formulating the conditions under which secrecy and authentication can be simultaneously achieved. To characterize the conditions for which secrecy can be achieved with high probability, we argue that there not only exists suitable protocols which enable Alice and Bob to map into the authenticated space of bit codewords with high probability, but also that forward conceptual channels, through cascading, can significantly increase Eve's probability of false acceptance. Albeit the fact that secrecy, along with conceputalizations of the public broadcast channel, were initially discussed by Maurer for QKD dependent protocols, determining whether aspects of such protocols can be adapted for unconditional security without the use of a secret key is of great interest to explore. We demonstrate that Eve's error probability, through the cascading procedure, can be analyzed with the Holevo information under an optimal decoder. Furthermore, through post-processing of the outputs of a Completely Positive Trace Preserving (CPTP) map, we also demonstrate how to decrease Holevo sum quantities with data-processing and entropy-continuity bounds.
We obtain estimates for Eve's forgery probability, namely the probability that she is able to forge a message which Alice or Bob mistakenly accept over a noisy Quantum channel for generating a shared Quantum secret key. This probability is related to Eve's success probability obtained in a previous work due to Renner and Wolf, which was obtained from assumptions on the min-entropy for characterizing asymmetric security. To demonstrate that protocols over noisy Quantum channels are dependent upon a single, unified security threshold in comparison to multiple security parameters in the Renner-Wolf interactive authentication protocol framework we upper bound Eve's forgery probability with a Holevo-type quantity that can be made negligibly small. By leveraging estimates for Eve's false acceptance probability that have previously been obtained by the author, we obtain the desired security threshold by bounding the false acceptance probability with a suitably chosen two-universal function which serves as a counterpart to two-universal hashing functions that have previously been examined for cryptographic protocols in Quantum key distribution. As a result the protocol is not only εεε-secure, for some ε>0ε>0ε>0, but also composable against forgery and key leakage.
An upper limit is given to the amount of quantum information that can be transmitted reliably down a noisy, decoherent quantum channel using the high-probability states of quantum sources. A class of quantum error-correcting codes is presented that allows the information transmitted to attain this limit. The result is a quantum analog of Shannon's bound and code for the noisy classical channel [C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1948)].
Shared entanglement is a resource available to parties communicating over a quantum channel, much akin to public coins in classical communication protocols: the two parties may be given some number of quantum bits jointly prepared in a fixed superposition, prior to communicating with each other. The quantum channel is then said to be "entanglement-assisted." Shared randomness does not help in the transmission of information from one party to another. Moreover, it does not significantly reduce the classical complexity of computing functions vis-a-vis private-coin protocols. On the other hand, prior entanglement leads to startling phenomena such as "quantum teleportation" and "superdense coding." The problem of characterising the power of prior entanglement has baffled many researchers, especially in the setting of bounded-error protocols. It is open whether it leads to more than a factor of two savings (using superdense coding) or more than an additive O(log) savings (when used to create shared randomness). Few lower bounds are known for communication problems in this setting, and are all derived using sophisticated information theoretic techniques. In this paper, we focus on the most basic problem in the setting of communication over an entanglement-assisted quantum channel, that of communicating classical bits from one party to another. We derive optimal bounds on the number of quantum bits required for this task, for any given probability of error.