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arXiv:2603.12024

All star-incompatible measurements can certify steering-based randomness

Shintaro Minagawa, Ravi Kunjwal

quant-phSubmitted Mar 12, 2026• Announced Mar 13, 2026• 0 citations• Revised Sep 29, 2026 (v2)

v1 · Mar 12, 2026 v2 · Sep 29, 2026

Abstract

Certifying that quantum randomness generated by untrusted devices is unpredictable to an attacker (say, Eve) is crucial for device-independent security. Bipartite protocols where only one of the parties is trusted are termed one-sided device-independent (1SDI) or steering-based protocols, where the untrusted party (say, Alice) performs measurements on her part of a bipartite entangled state to steer the subsystem of the trusted party (say, Bob) into different ensembles (collectively, an assemblage) of quantum states. Recent work has shown that an assemblage has certified randomness if and only if its realization requires a set of measurements that are star-incompatible, i.e., the measurement setting of interest for the guessing probability of Eve is incompatible with at least one of the remaining measurement settings of Alice. However, can one always extract randomness from star-incompatible measurements? And if so, how much randomness can one extract from them? Here we demonstrate that one can extract steering-based randomness from any set of star-incompatible measurements, thereby establishing an equivalence between star-incompatibility and steering-based randomness. We then provide a lower bound on the minimum guessing probability for a given set of measurements that is computable via semidefinite programming. This bound is tight when the Hilbert space dimension of Bob's system is at least that of Alice's. Finally, to provide a quantitative handle on star-incompatibility and the randomness extractable from it, we introduce a weight-based measure of star-incompatibility and lower bound the amount of star-incompatibility required to certify a given amount of randomness.

Comments: 23 pages, 3 figures

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Certifying that quantum randomness generated by untrusted devices is unpredictable to an attacker (say, Eve) is crucial for device-independent security. Bipartite protocols where only one of the parties is trusted are termed one-sided device-independent (1SDI) or steering-based protocols, where the untrusted party (say, Alice) performs measurements on her part of a bipartite entangled state to steer the subsystem of the trusted party (say, Bob) into different ensembles (collectively, an assemblage) of quantum states. Recent work has shown that an assemblage has certified randomness if and only if its realization requires a set of measurements that are star-incompatible, i.e., the measurement setting of interest for the guessing probability of Eve is incompatible with at least one of the remaining measurement settings of Alice. However, can one always extract randomness from star-incompatible measurements? And if so, how much randomness can one extract from them? Here we demonstrate that one can extract steering-based randomness from any set of star-incompatible measurements, thereby establishing an equivalence between star-incompatibility and steering-based randomness. We then provide a lower bound on the minimum guessing probability for a given set of measurements that is computable via semidefinite programming. This bound is tight when the Hilbert space dimension of Bob's system is at least that of Alice's. Finally, to provide a quantitative handle on star-incompatibility and the randomness extractable from it, we introduce a weight-based measure of star-incompatibility and lower bound the amount of star-incompatibility required to certify a given amount of randomness.

Certification of quantum systems and their properties has become a field of intensive study. Here, taking advantage of the one-sided device-independent (1SDI) scenario (also known as the quantum steering scenario), we propose a self-testing scheme for all bipartite entangled states using a single family of steering inequalities with the minimal number of two measurements per party. Building on this scheme we then show how to certify all rank-one extremal measurements, including nonprojective

{d}^{2}

-outcome measurements, which in turn can be used for certification of the maximal amount of randomness, that is,

2{\mathrm{log}}_{2}﻿d

bits. Finally, in the particular case of

d=3

, we propose an extended Bell scenario that transforms a 1SDI scheme to ``almost device independent.''

Entanglement in bipartite systems has been applied to generate secure random numbers, which are playing an important role in cryptography or scientific numerical simulations. Here, we propose to use multipartite entanglement distributed between trusted and untrusted parties for generating randomness of arbitrary dimensional systems. We show that the distributed structure of several parties leads to additional protection against possible attacks by an eavesdropper, resulting in more secure randomness generated than in the corresponding bipartite scenario. Especially, randomness can be certified in the group of untrusted parties, even when there is no randomness in either of them individually. We prove that the necessary and sufficient resource for quantum randomness in this scenario is multipartite quantum steering when each untrusted party has a choice between only two measurements. However, the sufficiency no longer holds with more measurement settings. Finally, we apply our analysis to some experimentally realized states and show that more randomness can be extracted compared with the existing analysis.

The prepare-and-measure framework based on energy constraints offers a practical middle ground between fully device-dependent and device-independent quantum cryptography. The only assumption on an otherwise uncharacterized prepare-and-measure device is that the energy of the prepared states is bounded. Existing security analyses of this framework assume that the preparation and measurement devices share at most classical correlations, and under this assumption certified lower bounds on the extractable randomness have been established. Recent work has shown that an adversary who pre-distributes entanglement between the devices can mount attacks that are strictly more powerful than those available when the devices share only classical correlations, reducing the extractable randomness below the previously certified rates. This leaves open the fundamental question of whether randomness can be certified at all in this scenario. We address this open question by constructing semidefinite programming relaxations of the guessing probability by adapting the Navascués-Pironio-Acín hierarchy to the energy-constrained setting where shared entanglement between the devices is permitted. Our relaxations yield certified lower bounds on the extractable randomness without enforcing any restrictions on the dimensions of the quantum state shared between the preparation and measurement devices. We show that these certified lower bounds are strictly positive for a range of energy values, thereby answering the open question affirmatively: certified randomness generation is theoretically possible in the energy-constrained SDI framework even in the presence of a fully quantum adversary.

Quantum steering captures the ability of one party, through local measurements on a shared entangled state, to affect the conditional states held by distant parties in a way that admits no local explanation. Its device-independent (DI) quantification -- requiring no characterization of any state or measurement -- has been developed in the bipartite setting, notably through the framework of assemblage moment matrices (AMMs) [Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 240401 (2016)], but has remained largely unexplored beyond it. Here, we extend the AMM framework to tripartite steering, covering both the scenario in which two parties jointly steer a third one (2-steer-1) and that in which a single party steers the remaining two (1-steer-2). For each scheme, we construct a semidefinite program that, from the observed correlations -- or merely from the violation of a Bell inequality -- yields lower bounds on the steering robustness of the underlying assemblage. As a by-product, our bounds also certify, in a DI manner, the incompatibility of the measurements performed by the steering parties.

The generation of certifiable randomness is one of the most promising applications of quantum technologies. Furthermore, the intrinsic non-locality of quantum correlations allow us to certify randomness in a device-independent way, i.e., we do not need to make assumptions about the devices used. Due to the work of Curchod et al. a single entangled two-qubit pure state can be used to produce arbitrary amounts of certified randomness. However, the obtaining of this randomness is experimentally challenging as it requires a large number of measurements, both projective and general. Motivated by these difficulties in the device-independent setting, we instead consider the scenario of one-sided device independence where certain devices are trusted, and others are not; a scenario motivated by asymmetric experimental set-ups such as ion-photon networks. We show how certain aspects of previous works can be adapted to this scenario and provide theoretical bounds on the amount of randomness that can be certified. Furthermore, we give a protocol for unbounded randomness certification in this scenario, and provide numerical results demonstrating the protocol in the ideal case. Finally, we numerically test the possibility of implementing this scheme on near-term quantum technologies, by considering the performance of the protocol on several physical platforms.

We present a trade-off between the amount of observed measurement incompatibility and the capabilities of a classical Eavesdropper in a prepare-and-measure scenario. The result is based on a qualitative connection between measurement incompatibility and randomness generation together with the utilization of incompatibility witnesses as randomness certificates. This allows one to use a geometric measure of incompatibility, the generalised robustness, to bound Eve's strategies through a semi-definite program, while providing an explicit protocol for generating randomness from any set of incompatible measurements. By translating the result to quantum steering, we find a tight connection between steerability and randomness generation in a setting using any finite number of measurement inputs. We further show how our techniques can be generalised to scenarios where Eve has a quantum memory by using a dimensional generalisation of joint measurability.