Certified quantum randomness

Antonio Acín, Lluís Masanes

Siddhartha Jain, Saachi Mutreja, Bhaskar Roberts

The generation of certified random bits is an emerging near-term application of quantum computers. Potential applications, such as randomness beacons and CRS generation, require nearly uniform randomness, whose rate (the ratio of min-entropy to bitlength) is ~ 1. However, existing protocols for certified randomness either produce weakly random strings with rate o(1), or they require a trusted random seed. We show how to certify randomness with the optimal rate ~ 1 without requiring any trusted randomness from the verifier. Our protocol is secure unconditionally in the quantum random oracle model (QROM). This improves the result of Coladangelo et al., who certified weakly random strings unconditionally in the QROM, and answers a question posed by Aaronson and Hung. We also define and construct a proof of conditional min-entropy, which certifies optimal min-entropy even conditioned on an adversarially chosen transcript. We show an application of this primitive to randomness beacons, where each pulse should have high min-entropy conditioned on all previous messages.

Peter Bierhorst

Y. Zhang, Hsin-Pin Lo, Takuya Ikuta +3 more

We demonstrate a simple scheme for generating certifiable quantum random numbers considering the imperfections in quantum devices employed. Particularly, we show low-latency real-time randomness generation from measurements on photonic time-bin states. Every 0.12s, we certify enough entropy against a quantum adversary to generate a block of 8192 random bits with a certified error bounded by 10-20. It can be run continuously and is thus well suited as a quantum randomness beacon.

Art Hobson

Mark Um, Junhua Zhang, Ye Wang +2 more