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arXiv:2610.00595

Quantum key distribution using generalized contextuality against post-quantum eavesdroppers

Daniel Centeno, Roberto D. Baldijão, Maria Ciudad Alañón, Yujie Zhang, Pedro Lauand, Elie Wolfe

quant-phSubmitted Sep 30, 2026• Announced Oct 2, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Bell nonlocality allows secret key to be certified without trusting the internal operation of the devices, and even against eavesdroppers constrained only by the no-signaling principle. We ask whether generalized contextuality, a notion of nonclassicality available in prepare-and-measure experiments on a single system, can play an analogous role. In our approach, Alice and Bob first establish operational equivalences among their local preparation and measurement procedures, which are then treated as theory-independent constraints that any physical intervention on the communication channel, including that of an adversary, must respect. Eve is otherwise unrestricted, that is, her intervention on the transmitted system is not assumed to be described by quantum theory. Within this adversarial model, we show that Eve's optimal guessing probability against individual attacks is the solution of a finite linear program, and hence that a worst-case asymptotic key rate follows from the observed statistics and the operational equivalences alone. We prove that contextuality is necessary for a positive key rate. However, we also show that it is not sufficient. Concretely, the (3,2)-parity-oblivious random access code, known to yield secret key against a quantum eavesdropper, yields none certifiable key rate against a post-quantum one. Conversely, operational equivalences with no analogue among no-signaling constraints can strictly increase the asymptotic key rate. We illustrate this with the prepare-and-measure version of the standard CHSH protocol with an aligned key-generating setting.

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9+7 pages, 5 figures. Comments are welcome!

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Bell nonlocality allows secret key to be certified without trusting the internal operation of the devices, and even against eavesdroppers constrained only by the no-signaling principle. We ask whether generalized contextuality, a notion of nonclassicality available in prepare-and-measure experiments on a single system, can play an analogous role. In our approach, Alice and Bob first establish operational equivalences among their local preparation and measurement procedures, which are then treated as theory-independent constraints that any physical intervention on the communication channel, including that of an adversary, must respect. Eve is otherwise unrestricted, that is, her intervention on the transmitted system is not assumed to be described by quantum theory. Within this adversarial model, we show that Eve's optimal guessing probability against individual attacks is the solution of a finite linear program, and hence that a worst-case asymptotic key rate follows from the observed statistics and the operational equivalences alone. We prove that contextuality is necessary for a positive key rate. However, we also show that it is not sufficient. Concretely, the (3,2)-parity-oblivious random access code, known to yield secret key against a quantum eavesdropper, yields none certifiable key rate against a post-quantum one. Conversely, operational equivalences with no analogue among no-signaling constraints can strictly increase the asymptotic key rate. We illustrate this with the prepare-and-measure version of the standard CHSH protocol with an aligned key-generating setting.
In this article we present a new prepare and measure quantum key distribution protocol that uses an experimentally accessible measure of single qubit contextuality to warranty the security of the quantum channel. The definition of contextuality used is that due to Spekkens in which any underlying hidden variable model of the physical system is noncontextual if the probability distribution of the model's hidden variables is independent of the preparation and measurement context. Under this more general definition of noncontextuality the measurement outcomes of a single qubit can be shown to require a contextual model in order to reproduce the results of some non-projective, positive operator valued measurements (POVMs). The proposed protocol utilizes a particular set of POVMs to exhibit the degree of contextuality of the qubits exiting the QKD system's quantum channel. The contextuality measure is defined in terms of the weak values of a set of projective measurements that are implemented as POVMs using weak measurements. The resulting QKD protocol should have a key rate that is equal to or greater than BB84 since none of the sifted key is used to test for the presence of an eavesdropper. Additionally, the new protocol is shown to be immune to detector based attacks.
We analyze a cryptographic protocol for generating a distributed secret key from correlations that violate a Bell inequality by a sufficient amount, and prove its security against eavesdroppers, constrained only by the assumption that any information accessible to them must be compatible with the non-signaling principle. The claim holds with respect to the state-of-the-art security definition used in cryptography, known as universally-composable security. The non-signaling assumption only refers to the statistics of measurement outcomes depending on the choices of measurements; hence security is independent of the internal workings of the devices - they do not even need to follow the laws of quantum theory. This is relevant for practice as a correct and complete modeling of realistic devices is generally impossible. The techniques developed are general and can be applied to other Bell inequality-based protocols. In particular, we provide a scheme for estimating Bell-inequality violations when the samples are not independent and identically distributed.
Every quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol must limit the information available outside the users' laboratories. In device-independent QKD this is essentially the only assumption made on the devices. In a prepare-and-measure setting it cannot be imposed strictly, since the sender's device must emit a signal that depends on her private input. The natural replacement, and a minimal one, is a leakage bound: a bound on how much information about the input leaves the sender's laboratory, through the intended signal or through any side channel. We ask how far this unavoidable requirement can replace a detailed model of the source. We show that this single bound, quantified by the probability of guessing the input from everything the source emits, suffices to prove security against collective attacks. In our analysis, nothing is assumed about the precise form of the emitted states, their dimension, energy or purity, nor about the receiver's measurement device, beyond the standard requirement that it does not leak Bob's data. The standard B92 and BB84 protocols do not certify any key under this minimal leakage bound assumption. But closely related protocols can and, in the ideal limit, achieve one secret bit per key round. For noisy implementations, we compute key rates using semidefinite programming relaxations. Our best protocols tolerate visibilities down to 0.84, corresponding to an 8% quantum bit error rate, compared with the 11% threshold of standard device-dependent BB84.
The predictions of quantum theory resist generalised noncontextual explanations. In addition to the foundational relevance of this fact, the particular extent to which quantum theory violates noncontextuality limits available quantum advantage in communication and information processing. In the first part of this work, we formally define contextuality scenarios via prepare-and-measure experiments, along with the polytope of general contextual behaviours containing the set of quantum contextual behaviours. This framework allows us to recover several properties of set of quantum behaviours in these scenarios, including contextuality scenarios and associated noncontextuality inequalities that require for their violation the individual quantum preparation and measurement procedures to be mixed states and unsharp measurements. With the framework in place, we formulate novel semidefinite programming relaxations for bounding these sets of quantum contextual behaviours. Most significantly, to circumvent the inadequacy of pure states and projective measurements in contextuality scenarios, we present a novel unitary operator based semidefinite relaxation technique. We demonstrate the efficacy of these relaxations by obtaining tight upper bounds on the quantum violation of several noncontextuality inequalities and identifying novel maximally contextual quantum strategies. To further illustrate the versatility of these relaxations, we demonstrate monogamy of preparation contextuality in a tripartite setting, and present a secure semi-device independent quantum key distribution scheme powered by quantum advantage in parity oblivious random access codes.
Semi-device-independent quantum key distribution leaves the measurement devices uncharacterized while placing a trusted assumption on Alice's source. We formulate this source assumption operationally on Alice's four-preparation ensemble as a scalar bound on one of four physically motivated source tasks: full-label guessing, parity guessing, or their normalized composites with label exclusion. For the two-bit random-access code, we derive the exact classical frontier for each of the four source assumptions. Numerically, the BB84 strategy attains the maximal quantum deviation from all four frontiers, while the preparation-depolarized BB84 family and the direct-sum label-leakage family trace complementary branches of the arbitrary-dimensional quantum boundary for the two exclusion-assisted assumptions. Because all four task values are monotone under input-independent quantum channels, the same scalar source bound constrains every Bob--Eve extension compatible with the complete observed behavior. Using a three-setting extension that separates RAC testing from key generation, we obtain two dimension-independent security certificates over this feasible set: lower bounds on the conditional min-entropy and conditional von Neumann entropy, obtained respectively by direct optimization of Eve's key-guessing probability and by prepare-and-measure semidefinite relaxations based on the Brown--Fawzi--Fawzi variational bound. The exclusion-assisted assumptions certify positive key rates down to nearly vanishing preparation visibility, far beyond full-label or parity guessing alone. Under direct-sum label leakage, all four independently optimized rate bounds remain positive at every sampled incomplete-leakage point and vanish only at complete label revelation. These results show that robust semi-device-independent security depends not only on what Eve can identify, but also on what she can exclude.
Device-independent quantum key distribution is a secure quantum cryptographic paradigm that allows two honest users to establish a secret key, while putting minimal trust in their devices. Most of the existing protocols have the following structure: first, a bipartite nonlocal quantum state is distributed between the honest users, who perform local projective measurements to establish nonlocal correlations. Then, they announce the implemented measurements and extract a secure key by postprocessing their measurement outcomes. We show that no protocol of this form allows for establishing a secret key when implemented on any correlation obtained by measuring local projective measurements on certain entangled nonlocal states, namely, on a range of entangled two-qubit Werner states. To prove this result, we introduce a technique for upper bounding the asymptotic key rate of device-independent quantum key distribution protocols, based on a simple eavesdropping attack. Our results imply that either different reconciliation techniques are needed for device-independent quantum key distribution in the large-noise regime, or Bell nonlocality is not sufficient for this task.