Quantum Computational Unpredictability Entropy and Quantum Leakage Resilience
Noam Avidan, Rotem Arnon-Friedman
Computational entropies provide a framework for quantifying uncertainty and randomness under computational constraints. They play a central role in classical cryptography, underpinning the analysis and construction of primitives such as pseudo-random generators, leakage-resilient cryptography, and randomness extractors. However, in the quantum setting, computational analogs of entropy remain largely unexplored. In this work, we initiate the study of quantum computational entropy by definingquantum computational unpredictability entropy, a natural generalization of classical unpredictability entropy to the quantum setting. Our definition builds on the operational interpretation of quantum min-entropy as the optimal guessing probability, while restricting the adversary to efficient guessing strategies. We prove that this entropy satisfies several fundamental properties, including a leakage chain rule that holds even in the presence of unbounded prior quantum side-information. We also show that unpredictability entropy enables pseudo-randomness extraction against quantum adversaries with bounded computational power. Together, these results lay a foundation for developing cryptographic tools that rely on min-entropy in the quantum computational setting.
arXiv:2505.13710•IEEE Transactions on Information Theory•Jan 28, 2026•1 citation