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NATO science for peace and security series. D, Information and communication security

Simplifying information-theoretic arguments by post-selection

Renato Renner

Published Jan 1, 2010• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Devices and protocols for information processing are often required to work for arbitrary inputs. For example, in channel coding theory, one demands that a coding scheme transmits any possible input state reliably over a given noisy channel. Similarly, in quantum cryptography, security of a protocol should hold independently of the inputs, even if they are chosen maliciously. In this short paper, we review the Post-Selection Technique introduced in (Phys. Rev. Lett. 102:020504, 2009). Its main purpose is to simplify the analysis of information processing schemes so that only one single input needs to be considered. If a scheme satisfies a desired criterion when acting on this particular input, then—under certain symmetry conditions—the same criterion is automatically met for arbitrary inputs. We illustrate the Post-Selection Technique at the example of quantum cryptography. Here, it can be used to show that security of a Quantum Key Distribution scheme against general attacks—somewhat surprisingly—follows from its security against one specific attack. This not only simplifies security proofs, but also has other remarkable implications, e.g., that no randomness is needed for privacy amplification.

DOI
10.3233/978-1-60750-547-1-66

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Security of quantum key distribution

Renato Renner

Quantum Information Theory is an area of physics which studies both fundamental and applied issues in quantum mechanics from an information-theoretical viewpoint. The underlying techniques are, however, often restricted to the analysis of systems which satisfy a certain independence condition. For example, it is assumed that an experiment can be repeated independently many times or that a large physical system consists of many virtually independent parts. Unfortunately, such assumptions are not always justified. This is particularly the case for practical applications — e.g. in quantum cryptography — where parts of a system might have an arbitrary and unknown behavior. We propose an approach which allows us to study general physical systems for which the above mentioned independence condition does not necessarily hold. It is based on an extension of various information-theoretical notions. For example, we introduce new uncertainty measures, called smooth min- and max-entropy, which are generalizations of ...

•Jan 1, 2005•263 citations
Devices and protocols for information processing are often required to work for arbitrary inputs. For example, in channel coding theory, one demands that a coding scheme transmits any possible input state reliably over a given noisy channel. Similarly, in quantum cryptography, security of a protocol should hold independently of the inputs, even if they are chosen maliciously. In this short paper, we review the Post-Selection Technique introduced in (Phys. Rev. Lett. 102:020504, 2009). Its main purpose is to simplify the analysis of information processing schemes so that only one single input needs to be considered. If a scheme satisfies a desired criterion when acting on this particular input, then—under certain symmetry conditions—the same criterion is automatically met for arbitrary inputs. We illustrate the Post-Selection Technique at the example of quantum cryptography. Here, it can be used to show that security of a Quantum Key Distribution scheme against general attacks—somewhat surprisingly—follows from its security against one specific attack. This not only simplifies security proofs, but also has other remarkable implications, e.g., that no randomness is needed for privacy amplification.
We propose a general method for studying properties of quantum channels acting on an n-partite system, whose action is invariant under permutations of the subsystems. Our main result is that, in order to prove that a certain property holds for an arbitrary input, it is sufficient to consider the case where the input is a particular de Finetti-type state, i.e., a state which consists of n identical and independent copies of an (unknown) state on a single subsystem. Our technique can be applied to the analysis of information-theoretic problems. For example, in quantum cryptography, we get a simple proof for the fact that security of a discrete-variable quantum key distribution protocol against collective attacks implies security of the protocol against the most general attacks. The resulting security bounds are tighter than previously known bounds obtained with help of the exponential de Finetti theorem.
We present a technique for proving the security of quantum-key-distribution (QKD) protocols. It is based on direct information-theoretic arguments and thus also applies if no equivalent entanglement purification scheme can be found. Using this technique, we investigate a general class of QKD protocols with one-way classical post-processing. We show that, in order to analyze the full security of these protocols, it suffices to consider collective attacks. Indeed, we give new lower and upper bounds on the secret-key rate which only involve entropies of two-qubit density operators and which are thus easy to compute. As an illustration of our results, we analyze the Bennett-Brassard 1984, the six-state, and the Bennett 1992 protocols with one-way error correction and privacy amplification. Surprisingly, the performance of these protocols is increased if one of the parties adds noise to the measurement data before the error correction. In particular, this additional noise makes the protocols more robust against noise in the quantum channel.
The post-selection technique was proposed by Christandl, König, and Renner [Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 020504 (2009)] to simplify the security of quantum-key-distribution schemes. This work applies this technique to derive the security bounds for the six-state Scarani-Acin-Rigbordy-Gisin 2004 quantum key distribution protocol. This protocol can extract secure keys from a source emitting multi-photons due to its robustness from photon number splitting attacks, making it a good candidate for practical implementations. We also compare the security bounds for this protocol under collective attacks to the security bounds obtained after applying the post-selection technique when using finite resources. Our results demonstrate that the bounds for optimal attack are close to the bound for collective attack for many signals. Notably, the six-state SARG04 protocol proves to be more robust to the PNS attacks when compared to the original four-state SARG04 protocol. This demonstrates the power of the post-selection technique in deriving the security bounds for the six-state protocol when finite resources are used.
Quantum Information Theory is an area of physics which studies both fundamental and applied issues in quantum mechanics from an information-theoretical viewpoint. The underlying techniques are, however, often restricted to the analysis of systems which satisfy a certain independence condition. For example, it is assumed that an experiment can be repeated independently many times or that a large physical system consists of many virtually independent parts. Unfortunately, such assumptions are not always justified. This is particularly the case for practical applications — e.g. in quantum cryptography — where parts of a system might have an arbitrary and unknown behavior. We propose an approach which allows us to study general physical systems for which the above mentioned independence condition does not necessarily hold. It is based on an extension of various information-theoretical notions. For example, we introduce new uncertainty measures, called smooth min- and max-entropy, which are generalizations of the von Neumann entropy. Furthermore, we develop a quantum version of de Finetti's representation theorem, as described below. Consider a physical system consisting of n parts. These might, for instance, be the outcomes of n runs of a physical experiment. Moreover, we assume that the joint state of this n-partite system can be extended to an (n + k)-partite state which is symmetric under permutations of its parts (for some k ≫ 1). The de Finetti representation theorem then says that the original n-partite state is, in a certain sense, close to a mixture of product states. Independence thus follows (approximatively) from a symmetry condition. This symmetry condition can easily be met in many natural situations. For example, it holds for the joint state of n parts, which are chosen at random from an arbitrary (n + k)-partite system. As an application of these techniques, we prove the security of quantum key distribution (QKD), i.e. secret key agreement by communication over a quantum channel. In particular, we show that, in order to analyze QKD protocols, it is generally sufficient to consider so-called collective attacks, where the adversary is restricted to applying the same operation to each particle sent over the quantum channel separately. The proof is generic and thus applies to known protocols such as BB84 and B92 (where better bounds on the secret-key rate and on the the maximum tolerated noise level of the quantum channel are obtained) as well as to continuous variable schemes (where no full security proof has been known). Furthermore, the security holds with respect to a strong so-called universally composable definition. This implies that the keys generated by a QKD protocol can safely be used in any application, e.g. for one-time pad encryption — which, remarkably, is not the case for most standard definitions.
Security proofs of quantum key distribution (QKD) often require post-processing schemes to simplify the data structure, and hence the security proof. We show a generic method to improve resulting secure key rates by partially reversing the simplifying post-processing for error correction purposes. We apply our method to the security analysis of device-independent QKD schemes and of detection-device-independent QKD schemes, where in both cases one is typically required to assign binary values even to lost signals. In the device-independent case, the loss tolerance threshold is cut down by our method from 92.4% to 90.9%. The lowest tolerable transmittance of the detection-device-independent scheme can be improved from 78.0% to 65.9%
Quantum Information Theory is an area of physics which studies both fundamental and applied issues in quantum mechanics from an information-theoretical viewpoint. The underlying techniques are, however, often restricted to the analysis of systems which satisfy a certain independence condition. For example, it is assumed that an experiment can be repeated independently many times or that a large physical system consists of many virtually independent parts. Unfortunately, such assumptions are not always justified. This is particularly the case for practical applications — e.g. in quantum cryptography — where parts of a system might have an arbitrary and unknown behavior. We propose an approach which allows us to study general physical systems for which the above mentioned independence condition does not necessarily hold. It is based on an extension of various information-theoretical notions. For example, we introduce new uncertainty measures, called smooth min- and max-entropy, which are generalizations of ...