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arXiv:2609.39234

Breaking the Bounded Entanglement Barrier for Quantum Position Verification

Amit Behera, Vipul Goyal

quant-phcs.CRSubmitted Sep 30, 2026• Announced Oct 1, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Position verification, introduced by Chandran et al. (SIAM J. Computing 2014), allows verifiers to test a prover's claimed position by an interactive protocol. Classical position verification is impossible. Even for Quantum Position Verification (QPV), there always exists an LOCC (Local Operations and Classical Communication) attack if the adversary can hold an exponentially large amount of preshared entanglement. Somewhat surprisingly, we show that we can circumvent this barrier in the idealized continuous-time model, where time is represented by a real-valued parameter and challenge messages can be sent at a time sampled uniformly from a real interval. In this model, we give a BB84-based protocol that remains secure against any finite coalition of LOCC adversaries with arbitrary finite (possibly exponential) quantum storage and entanglement. Our construction can also be instantiated in the discrete-time model. Even though the previous impossibility results apply, we are able to obtain an information-theoretic QPV protocol in which the honest parties' total resources (communication and storage) can be significantly smaller than the adversarial resource bound. In fact, we can achieve any desired polynomial gap between honest parties and adversarial resources. To our knowledge, all previous protocols in the literature required resources of the honest parties to be at least as large as the adversarial entanglement. Interestingly, the resource gap between the honest and adversarial party resources in our protocol depends on how precisely time can be measured. As the precision of the best-known clock improves with further research, the resource gap in our protocol keeps increasing. In particular, the adversarial resource bound keeps increasing while the honest parties' resources remain largely the same. We call this the "I sleep, you work" paradigm.

Related papers

Practically secure quantum position verification

Siddhartha Das, George Siopsis

Abstract We discuss quantum position verification (QPV) protocols in which the verifiers create and send single-qubit states to the prover. QPV protocols using single-qubit states are known to be insecure against adversaries that share a small number of entangled qubits. We introduce QPV protocols that are practically secure: they only require single-qubit states from each of the verifiers, yet their security is broken if the adversaries sharing an impractically large number of entangled qubits employ teleportation-based attacks. These protocols are a modification of known QPV protocols in which we include a classical random oracle without altering the amount of quantum resources needed by the verifiers. We present a cheating strategy that requires a number of entangled qubits shared among the adversaries that grows exponentially with the size of the classical input of the random oracle.

arXiv:1711.03392•New Journal of Physics•Jun 1, 2021•7 citations

Attack strategies for position-based quantum cryptography based on the Clifford Hierarchy

Kaushik Chakraborty, Anthony Leverrier

The goal of position-based cryptography is for an honest party to use her spatio-temporal position as her only credential in a cryptographic protocol. In particular, Position-Verification aims at verifying that a certain party, called the prover, holds a given position in spacetime. Such a protocol typically goes as follows: a set of verifiers will coordinate and send some challenge to the prover, and it is expected that only someone sitting in the supposed position of the prover can successfully pass the challenge. Two papers established that information theoretic security is not possible for Position-Based Quantum Cryptography (PBQC) protocols: neither in the classical [1], nor in the quantum [2] regime. More precisely, it is always possible for a coalition of adversaries to convince the verifiers, even if none of the adversary sits in the spatiotemporal region where the prover is supposed to be. At the same time, the best known attack strategies require the adversaries to share very entangled states: the attacks described in [2] are based on Vaidman’s protocol for nonlocal computation [3] and consist in the cheaters teleporting some quantum state back and forth, with a total cost in terms of required EPR pairs that scales double exponentially in n, the number of qubits involved in the PBQC protocol. Later, new generic attacks based on port-based teleportation[4] were proposed and require only exponential entanglement to succeed [5]. Finally, it is also know that a linear amount of entanglement is not su cient to break the PBQC protocol [5], [6]. A major open question in the field is to bridge the gap between lower and upper bounds: does there exist a protocol that requires exponentially many EPR pairs to break, or are all PBQC protocols insecure against a coalition of adversaries that shares polynomially many EPR pairs? While we do not settle this question in the present paper, we make some progress towards it by exhibiting new attack strategies with polynomial complexity against a large family of practical protocols. These attacks rely on teleportation gates and their precise complexity can be quantified with the notion of Cli↵ord hierarchy [7] of a quantum gate. We then introduce a new family of protocols, that generalizes a construction by Lau and Lo [8], which appears to be immune against these polynomialcomplexity attacks. Another main challenge is to determine whether there exist some PBQC protocol resistant to channel imperfections, either losses or noise, between the verifiers and

•Jun 4, 2015•1 citation

Arbitrarily Loss-Tolerant Quantum Position Verification in a Single Execution

Llorenç Escolà-Farràs, Boris Škorić, Florian Speelman

Quantum position verification (QPV) aims to certify the location of an untrusted prover, but faces two major obstacles: fundamentally, entanglement-based attacks and, experimentally, photon loss. A commitment-based modification introduced in Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 260801 addresses both in sequentially repeated protocols. Its security analysis, however, relies on the sequential structure and does not extend to parallel repetition. We use a different proof approach to establish security of the commitment modification for a parallel BB84-based QPV protocol. Against bounded-entanglement adversaries, the acceptance probability decays exponentially in the minimum number $k$ of successfully committed qubits. The protocol tolerates arbitrary transmission loss and noise rates up to 3.7%, while allowing arbitrarily slow quantum communication. This yields a fully loss-tolerant, single-execution QPV protocol secure against bounded-entanglement attacks, removing transmission loss as a fundamental limitation on verification distance. We also revisit sequential repetition, correcting the treatment of conditioning on commitment and replacing the earlier conditional guarantee with an unconditional security bound, without the finite-size correction to the correctness gap. The resulting bound provides improved quantitative security parameters for experimental implementations.

quant-pharXiv:2606.25037•Jun 25, 2026•0 citations

Enhanced No-Go Theorem for Quantum Position Verification

Fei Gao, Bin Liu, Qiaoyan Wen

Based on the instantaneous nonlocal quantum computation (INQC), Buhrman et al. proposed an excellent attack strategy to quantum position verification (QPV) protocols in 2011, and showed that, if the colluding adversaries are allowed to previously share unlimited entangled states, it is impossible to design an unconditionally secure QPV protocol in the previous model. Here, trying to overcome this no-go theorem, we find some assumptions in the INQC attack, which are implicit but essential for the success of this attack, and present three different QPV protocols where these assumptions are not satisfied. We show that for the general adversaries, who execute the attack operations at every common time slot or the time when they detect the arrival of the challenge signals from the verifiers, secure QPV is achievable. This implies practically secure QPV can be obtained even if the adversaries is allowed to share unlimited entanglement previously. Here by "practically" we mean that in a successful attack the adversaries need launch a new round of attack on the coming qubits with extremely high frequency so that none of the possible qubits, which may be sent at random time, will be missed. On the other side, using such Superdense INQC (SINQC) attack, the adversaries can still attack the proposed protocols successfully in theory. The particular attack strategies to our protocols are presented respectively. On this basis, we demonstrate the impossibility of secure QPV with looser assumptions, i.e. the enhanced no-go theorem for QPV.

arXiv:1305.4254•May 18, 2013•3 citations

Position-Based Quantum Cryptography: Impossibility and Constructions

Harry Buhrman, Nishanth Chandran, Serge Fehr +4 more

In this work, we study position-based cryptography in the quantum setting. The aim is to use the geographical position of a party as its only credential. On the negative side, we show that if adversaries are allowed to share an arbitrarily large entangled quantum state, the task of secure position-verification is impossible. To this end, we prove the following very general result. Assume that Alice and Bob hold respectively subsystems $A$ and $B$ of a (possibly) unknown quantum state $|\psi\rangle \in {\cal H}_A \otimes {\cal H}_B$. Their goal is to calculate and share a new state $|\varphi\rangle = U|\psi\rangle$, where $U$ is a fixed unitary operation. The question that we ask is how many rounds of mutual communication are needed. It is easy to achieve such a task using two rounds of classical communication, whereas, in general, it is impossible with no communication at all. Surprisingly, in case Alice and Bob share enough entanglement to start with and we allow an arbitrarily small failure probability, we show that the same task can be done using a single round of classical communication in which Alice and Bob exchange two classical messages. Actually, we prove that a relaxed version of the task can be done with no communication at all, where the task is to compute instead a state $|\varphi'\rangle$ that coincides with $|\varphi\rangle = U|\psi\rangle$ up to local operations on $A$ and on $B$, which are determined by classical information held by Alice and Bob. The one-round scheme for the original task then follows as a simple corollary. We also show that these results generalize to more players. As a consequence, we show a generic attack that breaks any position-verification scheme. On the positive side, we show that if adversaries do not share any entangled quantum state but can compute arbitrary quantum operations, secure position-verification is achievable. Jointly, these results suggest the interesting question whether secure position-verification is possible in case of a bounded amount of entanglement. Our positive result can be interpreted as resolving this question in the simplest case, where the bound is set to zero. In models where secure position-verification is achievable, it has a number of interesting applications. For example, it enables secure communication over an insecure channel without having any preshared key, with the guarantee that only a party at a specific location can learn the content of the conversation. More generally, we show that in settings where secure position-verification is achievable, other position-based cryptographic schemes are possible as well, such as secure position-based authentication and position-based key agreement.

arXiv:1009.2490•SIAM Journal on Computing•Jan 1, 2014•115 citations

Classical Verifier Position Verification from Non-Local Games

Wen Yu Kon, Fatih Kaleoglu, Kaushik Chakraborty

Secure position verification certifies that a remote prover occupies a claimed location, a task that is provably impossible with classical resources alone against colluding adversaries. Most existing quantum position verification schemes require transmitting quantum states between verifiers and provers, and the resulting photon loss makes long-distance verification impractical. Classical verifier position verification (CVPV) schemes with classical verifier-prover communication exist, but rely on complex quantum processes that generate certifiable randomness, placing them outside the reach of near-term hardware. Here we introduce a general compiler that maps any complete-support non-local game with the required quantum advantage into a multi-prover CVPV protocol. This addresses both limitations, with entirely classical verifier-prover communication and all quantum resources confined to shared entanglement and local measurements on the prover devices. Instantiating with the CHSH game enables near-term implementation on existing experimental platforms. We prove finite-size security in the quantum random oracle model for both simultaneous verification of multiple provers and verification of a single prover with multiple prover devices. Notably, security in the multi-prover setting is governed not by the certified randomness of the joint provers' outputs, but by certified blind local randomness that depends critically on the spatial arrangement of provers and verifiers.

quant-pharXiv:2609.38441•Oct 1, 2026•0 citations
Position verification, introduced by Chandran et al. (SIAM J. Computing 2014), allows verifiers to test a prover's claimed position by an interactive protocol. Classical position verification is impossible. Even for Quantum Position Verification (QPV), there always exists an LOCC (Local Operations and Classical Communication) attack if the adversary can hold an exponentially large amount of preshared entanglement.
Somewhat surprisingly, we show that we can circumvent this barrier in the idealized continuous-time model, where time is represented by a real-valued parameter and challenge messages can be sent at a time sampled uniformly from a real interval. In this model, we give a BB84-based protocol that remains secure against any finite coalition of LOCC adversaries with arbitrary finite (possibly exponential) quantum storage and entanglement.
Our construction can also be instantiated in the discrete-time model. Even though the previous impossibility results apply, we are able to obtain an information-theoretic QPV protocol in which the honest parties' total resources (communication and storage) can be significantly smaller than the adversarial resource bound. In fact, we can achieve any desired polynomial gap between honest parties and adversarial resources. To our knowledge, all previous protocols in the literature required resources of the honest parties to be at least as large as the adversarial entanglement.
Interestingly, the resource gap between the honest and adversarial party resources in our protocol depends on how precisely time can be measured. As the precision of the best-known clock improves with further research, the resource gap in our protocol keeps increasing. In particular, the adversarial resource bound keeps increasing while the honest parties' resources remain largely the same. We call this the "I sleep, you work" paradigm.
Abstract We discuss quantum position verification (QPV) protocols in which the verifiers create and send single-qubit states to the prover. QPV protocols using single-qubit states are known to be insecure against adversaries that share a small number of entangled qubits. We introduce QPV protocols that are practically secure: they only require single-qubit states from each of the verifiers, yet their security is broken if the adversaries sharing an impractically large number of entangled qubits employ teleportation-based attacks. These protocols are a modification of known QPV protocols in which we include a classical random oracle without altering the amount of quantum resources needed by the verifiers. We present a cheating strategy that requires a number of entangled qubits shared among the adversaries that grows exponentially with the size of the classical input of the random oracle.
The goal of position-based cryptography is for an honest party to use her spatio-temporal position as her only credential in a cryptographic protocol. In particular, Position-Verification aims at verifying that a certain party, called the prover, holds a given position in spacetime. Such a protocol typically goes as follows: a set of verifiers will coordinate and send some challenge to the prover, and it is expected that only someone sitting in the supposed position of the prover can successfully pass the challenge. Two papers established that information theoretic security is not possible for Position-Based Quantum Cryptography (PBQC) protocols: neither in the classical [1], nor in the quantum [2] regime. More precisely, it is always possible for a coalition of adversaries to convince the verifiers, even if none of the adversary sits in the spatiotemporal region where the prover is supposed to be. At the same time, the best known attack strategies require the adversaries to share very entangled states: the attacks described in [2] are based on Vaidman’s protocol for nonlocal computation [3] and consist in the cheaters teleporting some quantum state back and forth, with a total cost in terms of required EPR pairs that scales double exponentially in n, the number of qubits involved in the PBQC protocol. Later, new generic attacks based on port-based teleportation[4] were proposed and require only exponential entanglement to succeed [5]. Finally, it is also know that a linear amount of entanglement is not su cient to break the PBQC protocol [5], [6]. A major open question in the field is to bridge the gap between lower and upper bounds: does there exist a protocol that requires exponentially many EPR pairs to break, or are all PBQC protocols insecure against a coalition of adversaries that shares polynomially many EPR pairs? While we do not settle this question in the present paper, we make some progress towards it by exhibiting new attack strategies with polynomial complexity against a large family of practical protocols. These attacks rely on teleportation gates and their precise complexity can be quantified with the notion of Cli↵ord hierarchy [7] of a quantum gate. We then introduce a new family of protocols, that generalizes a construction by Lau and Lo [8], which appears to be immune against these polynomialcomplexity attacks. Another main challenge is to determine whether there exist some PBQC protocol resistant to channel imperfections, either losses or noise, between the verifiers and
Quantum position verification (QPV) aims to certify the location of an untrusted prover, but faces two major obstacles: fundamentally, entanglement-based attacks and, experimentally, photon loss. A commitment-based modification introduced in Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 260801 addresses both in sequentially repeated protocols. Its security analysis, however, relies on the sequential structure and does not extend to parallel repetition. We use a different proof approach to establish security of the commitment modification for a parallel BB84-based QPV protocol. Against bounded-entanglement adversaries, the acceptance probability decays exponentially in the minimum number kkk of successfully committed qubits. The protocol tolerates arbitrary transmission loss and noise rates up to 3.7%, while allowing arbitrarily slow quantum communication. This yields a fully loss-tolerant, single-execution QPV protocol secure against bounded-entanglement attacks, removing transmission loss as a fundamental limitation on verification distance. We also revisit sequential repetition, correcting the treatment of conditioning on commitment and replacing the earlier conditional guarantee with an unconditional security bound, without the finite-size correction to the correctness gap. The resulting bound provides improved quantitative security parameters for experimental implementations.
Based on the instantaneous nonlocal quantum computation (INQC), Buhrman et al. proposed an excellent attack strategy to quantum position verification (QPV) protocols in 2011, and showed that, if the colluding adversaries are allowed to previously share unlimited entangled states, it is impossible to design an unconditionally secure QPV protocol in the previous model. Here, trying to overcome this no-go theorem, we find some assumptions in the INQC attack, which are implicit but essential for the success of this attack, and present three different QPV protocols where these assumptions are not satisfied. We show that for the general adversaries, who execute the attack operations at every common time slot or the time when they detect the arrival of the challenge signals from the verifiers, secure QPV is achievable. This implies practically secure QPV can be obtained even if the adversaries is allowed to share unlimited entanglement previously. Here by "practically" we mean that in a successful attack the adversaries need launch a new round of attack on the coming qubits with extremely high frequency so that none of the possible qubits, which may be sent at random time, will be missed. On the other side, using such Superdense INQC (SINQC) attack, the adversaries can still attack the proposed protocols successfully in theory. The particular attack strategies to our protocols are presented respectively. On this basis, we demonstrate the impossibility of secure QPV with looser assumptions, i.e. the enhanced no-go theorem for QPV.
In this work, we study position-based cryptography in the quantum setting. The aim is to use the geographical position of a party as its only credential. On the negative side, we show that if adversaries are allowed to share an arbitrarily large entangled quantum state, the task of secure position-verification is impossible. To this end, we prove the following very general result. Assume that Alice and Bob hold respectively subsystems AAA and BBB of a (possibly) unknown quantum state ∣ψ⟩∈HA⊗HB|\psi\rangle \in {\cal H}_A \otimes {\cal H}_B∣ψ⟩∈HA​⊗HB​. Their goal is to calculate and share a new state ∣φ⟩=U∣ψ⟩|\varphi\rangle = U|\psi\rangle∣φ⟩=U∣ψ⟩, where UUU is a fixed unitary operation. The question that we ask is how many rounds of mutual communication are needed. It is easy to achieve such a task using two rounds of classical communication, whereas, in general, it is impossible with no communication at all. Surprisingly, in case Alice and Bob share enough entanglement to start with and we allow an arbitrarily small failure probability, we show that the same task can be done using a single round of classical communication in which Alice and Bob exchange two classical messages. Actually, we prove that a relaxed version of the task can be done with no communication at all, where the task is to compute instead a state ∣φ′⟩|\varphi'\rangle∣φ′⟩ that coincides with ∣φ⟩=U∣ψ⟩|\varphi\rangle = U|\psi\rangle∣φ⟩=U∣ψ⟩ up to local operations on AAA and on BBB, which are determined by classical information held by Alice and Bob. The one-round scheme for the original task then follows as a simple corollary. We also show that these results generalize to more players. As a consequence, we show a generic attack that breaks any position-verification scheme. On the positive side, we show that if adversaries do not share any entangled quantum state but can compute arbitrary quantum operations, secure position-verification is achievable. Jointly, these results suggest the interesting question whether secure position-verification is possible in case of a bounded amount of entanglement. Our positive result can be interpreted as resolving this question in the simplest case, where the bound is set to zero. In models where secure position-verification is achievable, it has a number of interesting applications. For example, it enables secure communication over an insecure channel without having any preshared key, with the guarantee that only a party at a specific location can learn the content of the conversation. More generally, we show that in settings where secure position-verification is achievable, other position-based cryptographic schemes are possible as well, such as secure position-based authentication and position-based key agreement.
Secure position verification certifies that a remote prover occupies a claimed location, a task that is provably impossible with classical resources alone against colluding adversaries. Most existing quantum position verification schemes require transmitting quantum states between verifiers and provers, and the resulting photon loss makes long-distance verification impractical. Classical verifier position verification (CVPV) schemes with classical verifier-prover communication exist, but rely on complex quantum processes that generate certifiable randomness, placing them outside the reach of near-term hardware. Here we introduce a general compiler that maps any complete-support non-local game with the required quantum advantage into a multi-prover CVPV protocol. This addresses both limitations, with entirely classical verifier-prover communication and all quantum resources confined to shared entanglement and local measurements on the prover devices. Instantiating with the CHSH game enables near-term implementation on existing experimental platforms. We prove finite-size security in the quantum random oracle model for both simultaneous verification of multiple provers and verification of a single prover with multiple prover devices. Notably, security in the multi-prover setting is governed not by the certified randomness of the joint provers' outputs, but by certified blind local randomness that depends critically on the spatial arrangement of provers and verifiers.