We present an end-to-end and practical randomness amplification and privatisation protocol based on Bell tests. This allows the building of device-independent random number generators which output (near-)perfectly unbiased and private numbers, even if using an uncharacterised quantum device potentially built by an adversary. Our generation rates are linear in the repetition rate of the quantum device and the classical randomness post-processing has quasi-linear complexity – making it efficient on a standard personal laptop. The statistical analysis is also tailored for real-world quantum devices. Our protocol is then showcased on several different quantum computers. Although not purposely built for the task, we show that quantum computers can run faithful Bell tests by adding minimal assumptions. In this semi-device-independent manner, our protocol generates (near-)perfectly unbiased and private random numbers on today's quantum computers.
We present an end-to-end and practical randomness amplification and privatisation protocol based on Bell tests. This allows the building of device-independent random number generators which output (near-)perfectly unbiased and private numbers, even if using an uncharacterised quantum device potentially built by an adversary. Our generation rates are linear in the repetition rate of the quantum device and the classical randomness post-processing has quasi-linear complexity – making it efficient on a standard personal laptop. The statistical analysis is also tailored for real-world quantum devices. Our protocol is then showcased on several different quantum computers. Although not purposely built for the task, we show that quantum computers can run faithful Bell tests by adding minimal assumptions. In this semi-device-independent manner, our protocol generates (near-)perfectly unbiased and private random numbers on today's quantum computers.
We present an end-to-end and practical randomness amplification and privatisation protocol based on Bell tests. This allows the building of device-independent random number generators which output (near-)perfectly unbiased and private numbers, even if using an uncharacterised quantum device potentially built by an adversary. Our generation rates are linear in the repetition rate of the quantum device and the classical randomness post-processing has quasi-linear complexity - making it efficient on a standard personal laptop. The statistical analysis is also tailored for real-world quantum devices. Our protocol is then showcased on several different quantum computers. Although not purposely built for the task, we show that quantum computers can run faithful Bell tests by adding minimal assumptions. In this semi-device-independent manner, our protocol generates (near-)perfectly unbiased and private random numbers on today's quantum computers.
We present the first complete implementation of a randomness and privacy amplification protocol based on Bell tests. This allows the building of device-independent random number generators which output provably unbiased and private numbers, even if using an uncharacterised quantum device potentially built by an adversary. Our generation rates are linear in the runtime of the quantum device and the classical randomness post-processing has quasi-linear complexity -- making it efficient on a standard personal laptop. The statistical analysis is tailored for real-world quantum devices, making it usable as a quantum technology today.
We then showcase our protocol on the quantum computers from the IBM-Q experience. Although not purposely built for the task, we show that quantum computer can run faithful Bell tests by adding minimal assumptions. At a high level, these amount to trusting that the quantum device was not purposely built to trick the user, but otherwise remains mostly uncharacterised. In this semi-device-independent manner, our protocol generates provably private and unbiased random numbers on today's quantum computers.
Abstract Realistic quantum information processing devices are inherently imperfect, leading to computational errors that require quantum error correction. Likewise, random bits generated by such devices are flawed and must be enhanced to be usable for applications such as generating cryptographic keys. This enhancement of randomness quality is achieved through a protocol known as randomness amplification 1 . Here we report on an experiment that implements such a protocol. Randomness amplification is device-independent, making no assumptions about the internal workings of the quantum devices. It requires executing a loophole-free Bell test 2–4 within a specific parameter regime that involves both a high Bell violation and a high repetition rate. The experimental demonstration is made possible by a combination of theoretical advances, which allow for protocols with an experimentally realistic parameter regime, and experimental progress that achieves this regime with superconducting circuits. Crucially, randomness amplification has been proven to be impossible by purely classical means 5 . This experiment therefore demonstrates a definitive quantum advantage—leveraging quantum technology to accomplish a task unattainable by classical information processing.
Randomness amplification, the task of extracting uniform private bits from biased seeds that may be partly known by a malicious third party, is of central importance in cryptography. The highest security in this task is provided by a class of quantum protocols known as device-independent, which however are challenging to integrate into scalable devices. Semi-device-independent (SDI) protocols are a promising alternative that guarantees security under few natural assumptions, such as bounds on the amount of energy used by the devices. Here, we provide the first demonstration of SDI randomness amplification on an integrated silicon photonic chip, achieving a throughput rate of 20 Mbps suitable for practical applications. This rate is achieved through a novel technique for SDI entropy certification, which delivers strictly tighter von Neumann entropy bounds compared to existing methods and remains valid even if the preparation and measurement devices share quantum correlations. Overall, the methods developed in this work enable the integration of SDI technology into portable telecom devices, opening up a new generation of quantum cryptographic hardware.
Secret and perfect randomness is an essential resource in cryptography. Yet, it is not even clear that such exists. It is well known that the tools of classical computer science do not allow us to create secret and perfect randomness from a single weak public source. Quantum physics, on the other hand, allows for such a process, even in the most paranoid cryptographic sense termed “device-independent quantum cryptography”. We propose and prove the security of a new device-independent protocol that takes any single public Santha-Vazirani source as input and creates a secret close to uniform string in the presence of a quantum adversary. Our work is the first to achieve randomness amplification with all the following properties: (1) amplification and “privatization” of a public Santha-Vazirani source with arbitrary bias (2) the use of a device with only two components (3) non-vanishing extraction rate and (4) maximal noise tolerance. In particular, this implies that our protocol is the first protocol that can possibly be implemented with reachable parameters. We achieve these by combining three new tools: a particular family of Bell inequalities, a proof technique to lower bound entropy in the device-independent setting, and a framework for quantum-proof multi-source extractors.
Quantum Bell nonlocality allows for the design of protocols that amplify the randomness of public and arbitrarily biased Santha-Vazirani sources, a classically impossible task. Information-theoretical security in these protocols is certified in a device-independent manner, i.e. solely from the observed nonlocal statistics and without any assumption about the inner-workings of the intervening devices. On the other hand, if one is willing to trust on a complete quantum-mechanical description of a protocol's devices, the elementary scheme in which a qubit is alternatively measured in a pair of mutually unbiased bases is, straightforwardly, a protocol for randomness amplification. In this work, we study the unexplored middle ground. We prove that full randomness amplification can be achieved without requiring entanglement or a complete characterization of the intervening quantum states and measurements. Based on the energy-bounded framework introduced in [Van Himbeeck et al., Quantum 1, 33 (2017)], our prepare-and-measure protocol is able to amplify the randomness of any public Santha-Vazirani source, requiring the smallest number of inputs and outcomes possible and being secure against quantum adversaries.