In this thesis we have studied how to exploit relativistic constraints such as the non-superluminal signalling principle to design secure cryptographic primitives like position-verification and bit commitment. According to non-superluminal signalling principle, no physical carrier of information can travel faster than the speed of light. This put a constraint on the communication time between two distant stations. One can consider this delay in information transfer as a temporal non-communication constraint. Cryptographic primitives like bit-commitment, oblivious transfer can be implemented with perfect secrecy under such non-communication assumption between the agents. The first part of this thesis has studied how non-signalling constraints can be used for secure position verification. Here, we have discussed about a strategy which can attack any position verification scheme. In the next part of this thesis we have discussed about the nonlocal games, relevant for studying relativistic bit commitment protocols. We have established an upper bound on the classical value of such family of games. The last part of this thesis discusses about two relativistic bit commitment protocols and their security against classical adversaries. We conclude this thesis by giving a brief summary of the content of each chapter and mentioning interesting open problems. These open problems can be very useful for better understanding of the role of spacetime constraints such as non-superluminal signalling in designing perfectly secure cryptographic primitives.
In this thesis we have studied how to exploit relativistic constraints such as the non-superluminal signalling principle to design secure cryptographic primitives like position-verification and bit commitment. According to non-superluminal signalling principle, no physical carrier of information can travel faster than the speed of light. This put a constraint on the communication time between two distant stations. One can consider this delay in information transfer as a temporal non-communication constraint. Cryptographic primitives like bit-commitment, oblivious transfer can be implemented with perfect secrecy under such non-communication assumption between the agents. The first part of this thesis has studied how non-signalling constraints can be used for secure position verification. Here, we have discussed about a strategy which can attack any position verification scheme. In the next part of this thesis we have discussed about the nonlocal games, relevant for studying relativistic bit commitment protocols. We have established an upper bound on the classical value of such family of games. The last part of this thesis discusses about two relativistic bit commitment protocols and their security against classical adversaries. We conclude this thesis by giving a brief summary of the content of each chapter and mentioning interesting open problems. These open problems can be very useful for better understanding of the role of spacetime constraints such as non-superluminal signalling in designing perfectly secure cryptographic primitives.
This thesis considers multi-prover commitment schemes whose security is based on restrictions on the communication between the provers. The results are applicable to so-called relativistic commitment schemes: schemes whose security is guaranteed by the fact that information does not travel faster than the speed of light. A commitment scheme is a cryptographic protocol solving the following problem: One party, the prover, has selected a value which he wants to keep secret at first. The prover wants to have the option to reveal it to the other party, the verifier, at a later time, but the verifier wants a guarantee that no value other than the originally selected one can be revealed. Standard commitment schemes can only be proven secure with computational hardness assumptions. This can be circumvented by splitting the prover into multiple entities and restricting their communication, e.g., no communication at all, or communication only with a delay (as in relativistic commitment schemes). This dissertation introduces new methods for analyzing and designing such multi-prover schemes. As an application, we show that the Lunghi et al. commitment scheme from 2015 has much stronger security that their original analysis indicated.
In this thesis we explore the benefits of relativistic constraints for cryptography. We first revisit non-communicating models and its applications in the context of interactive proofs and cryptography. We propose bit commitment protocols whose security hinges on communication constraints and investigate its limitations. We explain how some non-communicating models can be justified by special relativity and study the limitations of such models. In particular, we present a framework for analysing security of multiround relativistic protocols. The second part of the thesis is dedicated to analysing specific protocols. We start by considering a recently proposed two-round quantum bit commitment protocol. We propose a fault-tolerant variant of the protocol, present a complete security analysis and report on an experimental implementation performed in collaboration with an experimental group at the University of Geneva. We also propose a new, multiround classical bit commitment protocol and prove its security against classical adversaries. This demonstrates that in the classical world an arbitrarily long commitment can be achieved even if the agents are restricted to occupy a finite region of space. Moreover, the protocol is easy to implement and we report on an experiment performed in collaboration with the Geneva group.
Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive in which Alice wishes to commit a secret bit to Bob. Perfectly secure bit commitment between two mistrustful parties is impossible through an asynchronous exchange of quantum information. Perfect security is, however, possible when Alice and Bob each split into several agents exchanging classical information at times and locations suitably chosen to satisfy specific relativistic constraints. In this Letter we first revisit a previously proposed scheme [C. Crépeau et al., Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 7073, 407 (2011)] that realizes bit commitment using only classical communication. We prove that the protocol is secure against quantum adversaries for a duration limited by the light-speed communication time between the locations of the agents. We then propose a novel multiround scheme based on finite-field arithmetic that extends the commitment time beyond this limit, and we prove its security against classical attacks. Finally, we present an implementation of these protocols using dedicated hardware and we demonstrate a 2 ms-long bit commitment over a distance of 131 km. By positioning the agents on antipodal points on the surface of Earth, the commitment time could possibly be extended to 212 ms.
Quantum mechanics, which describes the behaviour of matter and energy on very small scales, is one of the most successful theories in the history of science. Einstein's theory of special relativity, which describes the relationship between space and time, is likewise a highly successful and widely accepted theory. And yet there is a well-documented tension between the two theories, to the extent that it is still not clear that the two can ever be reconciled. This thesis is concerned with furthering the current understanding of the relationship between quantum mechanics and special relativity. In the first part of the thesis we study the behaviour of quantum information in relativistic spacetime. The field of quantum information arose from the realisation that quantum information has a number of crucial properties that distinguish it from classical information, such as the no-cloning property, quantum contextuality, and quantum discord. More recently, it has been realised that placing quantum information under relativistic constraints leads to the emergence of further unique features which are not exhibited by either non-relativistic quantum information or relativistic classical information; as part of this ongoing research programme we develop a new relativistic quantum `paradox' which puts pressure on conventional views about the spatiotemporal persistence of quantum states over time. We then study a new set of relativistic quantum protocols which involve the distribution of entangled states over spacetime, defining one task involving the distribution of the two halves of a known entangled state, and another task involving the distribution of the two halves of an unknown entangled state. The second part of the thesis deals with relativistic quantum cryptography, a field which first began attracting serious attention when it was realised that a cryptographic task known as `bit commitment,' can be implemented with perfect security under relativistic constraints. This result was highly significant, since it is provably impossible to implement bit commitment with perfect security in a purely classical or purely quantum context, and hence bit commitment is an ideal starting point for probing the power of relativistic quantum cryptography. In this thesis we propose several new relativistic quantum bit commitment protocols which have notable advantages over previously known protocols. We then move to a related task, a generalization of zero-knowledge proving which we refer to as knowledge-concealing evidencing of knowledge of a quantum state; we prove no-go theorems concerning the possibility of implementing this task with perfect security, and then set out a relativistic protocol for the task which is asymptotically secure as the dimension of the state in question becomes large. These results have interesting foundational significance above and beyond their applications in the field of cryptography, providing a new perspective on the connections between knowledge, realism and quantum states.
As a fundamental cryptographic primitive, bit commitment has lots of important and practical applications in modern cryptography. All previously proposed non-relativistic quantum bit commitment protocols cannot evade the Lo–Chau and Mayers attacks. Furthermore, relativistic quantum bit commitment protocols require rigorous spacetime constraints. In this paper, we present a simple, feasible but practically secure quantum bit commitment protocol without any spacetime constraint. The security of the proposed protocol is based on non-relativistic quantum mechanics, but it can resist all known attacks, including the Lo–Chau and Mayers attacks in practice.
We propose a new classical bit commitment protocol using the relativistic constraint that signals cannot travel faster than the speed of light c. This protocol is unconditionally secure against both classical or quantum attacks. The sender (Alice) and the receiver (Bob) each controls two secure stations separated by a large distance d, and they communicate by exchanging classical information only. Alice commits by sending from her stations two causally independent encrypted messages to the neighboring Bob's stations, after that the protocol is out of her control and she plays no role in the unveiling phase. The commitment remains concealed for a period of Δt=d/2c. This protocol requires only limited communication resources and is readily implementable with current technologies.