A natural measure for the amount of quantum information that a physical system E holds about another system A = A 1 ,..., A n is given by the min-entropy H min ( A | E ). Specifically, the min-entropy measures the amount of entanglement between E and A , and is the relevant measure when analyzing a wide variety of problems ranging from randomness extraction in quantum cryptography, decoupling used in channel coding, to physical processes such as thermalization or the thermodynamic work cost (or gain) of erasing a quantum system. As such, it is a central question to determine the behaviour of the min-entropy after some process M is applied to the system A . Here we introduce a new generic tool relating the resulting min-entropy to the original one, and apply it to several settings of interest, including sampling of subsystems and measuring in a randomly chosen basis. The results on random measurements yield new high-order entropic uncertainty relations with which we prove the optimality of cryptographic schemes in the bounded quantum storage model. This is an abridged version of the paper; the full version containing all proofs and further applications can be found in [13]. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
A natural measure for the amount of quantum information that a physical system E holds about another system A = A 1 ,..., A n is given by the min-entropy H min ( A | E ). Specifically, the min-entropy measures the amount of entanglement between E and A , and is the relevant measure when analyzing a wide variety of problems ranging from randomness extraction in quantum cryptography, decoupling used in channel coding, to physical processes such as thermalization or the thermodynamic work cost (or gain) of erasing a quantum system. As such, it is a central question to determine the behaviour of the min-entropy after some process M is applied to the system A . Here we introduce a new generic tool relating the resulting min-entropy to the original one, and apply it to several settings of interest, including sampling of subsystems and measuring in a randomly chosen basis. The results on random measurements yield new high-order entropic uncertainty relations with which we prove the optimality of cryptographic schemes in the bounded quantum storage model. This is an abridged version of the paper; the full version containing all proofs and further applications can be found in [13]. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
A natural measure for the amount of quantum information that a physical system E holds about another system A = A1, .. . , Anis given by the min-entropy Hmin(A|E). In particular, the min-entropy measures the amount of entanglement between E and A, and is the relevant measure when analyzing a wide variety of problems ranging from randomness extraction in quantum cryptography, decoupling used in channel coding, to physical processes such as thermalization or the thermodynamic work cost (or gain) of erasing a quantum system. As such, it is a central question to determine the behavior of the minentropy after some process M. is applied to the system A. Here, we introduce a new generic tool relating the resulting min-entropy to the original one, and apply it to several settings of interest. A simple example of such a process is the one of sampling, where a subset S of the systems A1, ... , An is selected at random. Our tool allows us to quantify the entanglement that E has with the selected systems AS, i.e., Hmin(AS|ES) as a function of the original Hmin(A|E). We give two applications of this result. First, it directly provides the first local quantum-to-classical randomness extractors for use in quantum cryptography, as well as decoupling operations acting on only a small fraction AS of the input A. Moreover, it gives lower bounds on the dimension of k-out-of-n fully quantum random access encodings. Another natural example of such a process is a measurement in, e.g., BB84 bases commonly used in quantum cryptography. We establish the first entropic uncertainty relations with quantum side information that are nontrivial whenever E is not maximally entangled with A. As a consequence, we are able to prove optimality of quantum cryptographic schemes in the noisy-storage model. This model allows for the secure implementation of two-party cryptographic primitives under the assumption that the adversary cannot store quantum information perfectly. A special case is the bounded-quantum-storage model (BQSM), which assumes that the adversary's quantum memory device is noise free but limited in size. Ever since the inception of the BQSM, it has been a vexing open question to determine whether the security is possible as long as the adversary can only.
LetX1,…,Xnbe a sequence ofnclassical random variables and consider a sampleXs1,…,Xsrofr≤npositions selected at random. Then, except with (exponentially inr) small probability, the min-entropyHmin(Xs1⋯Xsr)of the sample is not smaller than, roughly, a fractionnrof the overall entropyHmin(X1⋯Xn), which is optimal. Here, we show that this statement, originally proved in [S. Vadhan, LNCS 2729, Springer, 2003] for the purely classical case, is still true if the min-entropyHminis measured relative to a quantum system. Because min-entropy quantifies the amount of randomness that can be extracted from a given random variable, our result can be used to prove the soundness of locally computable extractors in a context where side information might be quantum-mechanical. In particular, it implies that key agreement in the bounded-storage model—using a standard sample-and-hash protocol—is fully secure against quantum adversaries, thus solving a long-standing open problem.
Min-entropy sampling gives a bound on the min-entropy of a randomly chosen subset of a string, given a bound on the min-entropy of the whole string. König and Renner showed a min-entropy sampling theorem that holds relative to quantum knowledge. Their result achieves the optimal rate, but it can only be applied if the bits are sampled in blocks, and only gives weak bounds for the non-smooth min-entropy. We give two new quantum min-entropy sampling theorems that do not have the above weaknesses. The first theorem shows that the result by König and Renner also applies to bitwise sampling, and the second theorem gives a strong bound for the non-smooth min-entropy. Our results imply a new lower bound for k-out-of-n random access codes: while previous results by Ben-Aroya, Regev, and de Wolf showed that the decoding probability is exponentially small in k if the storage rate is smaller than 0.7, our results imply that this holds for any storage rate strictly smaller than 1, which is optimal.
The goal of randomness extraction is to distill (almost) perfect randomness from a weak source of randomness. When the source yields a classical string X, many extractor constructions are known. Yet, when considering a physical randomness source, X is itself ultimately the result of a measurement on an underlying quantum system. When characterizing the power of a source to supply randomness, it is hence natural to ask how much classical randomness we can extract from a quantum system. To tackle this question, we here take on the study of quantum-to-classical randomness extractors (QC-extractors). We provide constructions of QC-extractors based on measurements in a full set of mutually unbiased bases (MUBs), and certain single qubit measurements. The latter are particularly appealing since they are not only easy to implement, but also appear throughout quantum cryptography. We proceed to prove an upper bound on the maximum amount of randomness that we could hope to extract from any quantum state. Some of our QC-extractors almost match this bound. We show two applications of our results. First, we show that any QC-extractor gives rise to entropic uncertainty relations with respect to quantum side information. Such relations were previously only known for two measurements. In particular, we obtain strong relations in terms of the von Neumann (Shannon) entropy as well as the min-entropy for measurements in (almost) unitary two-designs, a full set of MUBs, and single qubit measurements in three MUBs each. Second, we resolve the central open question in the noisy-storage model by linking security to the quantum capacity of the adversary's storage device. More precisely, we show that any two party cryptographic primitives can be implemented securely as long as the adversary's storage device has sufficiently low quantum capacity. Our protocol does not need any quantum storage to implement, and is technologically feasible using present-day technology.
We derive a new entropic quantum uncertainty relation involving min-entropy. The relation is tight and can be applied in various quantum-cryptographic settings. Protocols for quantum 1-out-of-2 Oblivious Transfer and quantum Bit Commitment are presented and the uncertainty relation is used to prove the security of these protocols in the bounded quantum-storage model according to new strong security definitions. As another application, we consider the realistic setting of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) against quantum-memory-bounded eavesdroppers. The uncertainty relation allows to prove the security of QKD protocols in this setting while tolerating considerably higher error rates compared to the standard model with unbounded adversaries. For instance, for the six-state protocol with one-way communication, a bit-flip error rate of up to 17% can be tolerated (compared to 13% in the standard model). Our uncertainty relation also yields a lower bound on the min-entropy key uncertainty against known-plaintext attacks when quantum ciphers are composed. Previously, the key uncertainty of these ciphers was only known with respect to Shannon entropy.
In quantum Shannon theory, various kinds of quantum entropies are used to characterize the capacities of noisy physical systems. Among them, min-entropy and its smooth version attract wide interest especially in the field of quantum cryptography as they can be used to bound the information obtained by an adversary. However, calculating the exact value or nontrivial bounds of min-entropy are extremely difficult because the composite system dimension may scale exponentially with the dimension of its subsystem. Here, we develop a one-shot lower bound calculation technique for the min-entropy of a classical-quantum state that is applicable to both finite and infinite dimensional reduced quantum states. Moreover, we show our technique is of practical interest in at least three situations. First, it offers an alternative tight finite-data analysis for the BB84 quantum key distribution scheme. Second, it gives the best finite-key bound known to date for a variant of device independent quantum key distribution protocol. Third, it provides a security proof for a novel source-independent continuous-variable quantum random number generation protocol. These results show the effectiveness and wide applicability of our approach.