Non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proof systems are a cornerstone of modern cryptography, but their security has received little attention in the quantum settings. Motivated by improving our understanding of this fundamental primitive against quantum adversaries, we propose a new definition of security against quantum adversary. Specifically, we define the notion of quantum simulation soundness (SS-NIZK), that allows the adversary to access the simulator in superposition. We show a separation between post-quantum and quantum security of SS-NIZK, and prove that Sahai’s construction for SS-NIZK (in the CRS model) can be made quantumly-simulation-sound. As an immediate application of our new notion, we prove the security of the Naor-Yung paradigm in the quantum settings, with respect to a strong quantum IND-CCA security notion. This provides the quantum analogue of the classical dual key approach to prove the security of encryption schemes. Along the way, we introduce a new notion of quantum-query advantage functions, which may be used as a general framework to show classical/quantum separation for other cryptographic primitives, and it may be of independent interest.
Non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proof systems are a cornerstone of modern cryptography, but their security has received little attention in the quantum settings. Motivated by improving our understanding of this fundamental primitive against quantum adversaries, we propose a new definition of security against quantum adversary. Specifically, we define the notion of quantum simulation soundness (SS-NIZK), that allows the adversary to access the simulator in superposition. We show a separation between post-quantum and quantum security of SS-NIZK, and prove that Sahai’s construction for SS-NIZK (in the CRS model) can be made quantumly-simulation-sound. As an immediate application of our new notion, we prove the security of the Naor-Yung paradigm in the quantum settings, with respect to a strong quantum IND-CCA security notion. This provides the quantum analogue of the classical dual key approach to prove the security of encryption schemes. Along the way, we introduce a new notion of quantum-query advantage functions, which may be used as a general framework to show classical/quantum separation for other cryptographic primitives, and it may be of independent interest.
The emergence of quantum computing has provided new paradigms for cryptography. On the one hand, it poses significant new threats to existing classically cryptographic systems, requiring the community to define new security models that capture what a quantum adversary can do. On the other hand, it gives us new tools to design cryptographic protocols, with weaker assumptions than in the classical world, or even protocols that are impossible classically. In this survey, we first give an overview of new security definitions for classical cryptography, considering quantum adversaries who can either only use local quantum computation (post-quantum security), or even send quantum messages and in particular have access to oracle in superposition (quantum security). We explore these new notions through the examples of commitments, zero-knowledge proofs, encryption, and signatures. Then, we present what is arguably the most famous application of quantum cryptography: quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols that take advantage of unique properties of quantum mechanics to provide secure communication unconditionally. We also explore cryptography beyond QKD, focusing on unclonable cryptography: a family of cryptographic functionalities, built with quantum states, and designed to be resistant to counterfeit by leveraging the “no-cloning” theorem. We examine in particular quantum money, but also the recent notions of unclonable encryption and copy-protection, including related variants. By presenting a comprehensive survey of these topics, this paper aims to provide a thorough understanding of the current landscape and future potential of quantum cryptography.
We call quantum security the area of IT security dealing with scenarios where one or more parties have access to quantum hardware. This encompasses both the fields of post-quantum cryptography (that is, traditional cryptography engineered to be resistant against quantum adversaries), and quantum cryptography (that is, security protocols designed to be natively run on a quantum infrastructure, such as quantum key distribution). Moreover, there exist also hybrid models, where traditional cryptographic schemes are somehow `mixed' with quantum operations in certain scenarios. Even if a fully-fledged, scalable quantum computer has yet to be built, recent results and the pace of research in its realization call for attention, lest we suddenly find ourselves one day with an obsolete security infrastructure. For this reason, in the last two decades research in quantum security has experienced an exponential growth in interest and investments. In this work, we propose the first systematic classification of quantum security scenarios, and for each of them we recall the main tools and results, as well as presenting new ones. We achieve this goal by identifying four distinct quantum security classes, or domains, each of them encompassing the security notions and constructions related to a particular scenario. We start with the class QS0, which is `classical cryptography' (meaning that no quantum scenario is considered), where we present some classical constructions and results as a preliminary step. Regarding post-quantum cryptography, we introduce the class QS1, where we discuss in detail the problems arising when designing a classical cryptographic object meant to be resistant against adversaries with local quantum computing power, and we provide a classification of the possible quantum security reductions in this scenario when considering provable security. Moreover, we present results about the quantum security and insecurity of the Fiat-Shamir transformation (a useful tool used to turn interactive identification schemes into digital signatures), and ORAMs (protocols used to outsource a database in a private way). In respect to hybrid classical-quantum models, in the security class QS2 we discuss in detail the possible scenarios where these scenarios arise, and what a correct formalization should be in terms of quantum oracle access. We also provide a novel framework for the quantum security (both in terms of indistinguishability and semantic security) of secret-key encryption schemes, and we give explicit secure constructions, as well as impossibility results. Finally, in the class QS3 we consider all those cryptographic constructions designed to run natively on quantum hardware. We give constructions for quantum encryption schemes (both in the secret- and public-key scenario), and we introduce transformations for obtaining such schemes by conceptually simpler schemes from the class QS2. Moreover, we introduce a quantum version of ORAM, called quantum ORAM (QORAM), aimed at outsourcing in a private way a database composed of quantum data. In proposing a suitable security model and an explicit construction for QORAMs, we also introduce a technique of independent interest which models a quantum adversary able to extract information from a quantum system without disturbing it `too much'. We believe that the framework we introduce in this work will be a valuable tool for the scientific community in addressing the challenges arising when formalizing sound constructions and notions of security in the quantum world.
Attacks on cryptographic protocols are usually modeled by allowing an adversary to ask queries to an oracle. Security is then defined by requiring that as long as the queries satisfy some constraint, there is some problem the adversary cannot solve, such as compute a certain piece of information. Even if the protocol is quantum, the queries are typically classical. In this paper, we introduce a new model of quantum attacks on protocols, where the adversary is allowed quantum access to the primitive, i.e., he may ask several classical queries in quantum superposition. This is a strictly stronger attack than the standard one, and we consider the security of several primitives in this model. We show that a secret-sharing scheme that is secure with threshold t in the standard model is secure against superposition attacks if and only if the threshold is lowered to t/2 . This holds for all classical as well as all known quantum secret sharing schemes. We then consider zero- knowledge and first show that known protocols are not, in general, secure in our model by designing a superposition attack on the well-known zero-knowledge protocol for graph isomorphism. We then use our secret-sharing result to design zero-knowledge proofs for all of NP in the common reference string model. While our protocol is classical, it is sound against a cheating unbounded quantum prover and computational zero-knowledge even if the verifier is allowed a superposition attack. Finally, we consider multiparty computation and give a characterization of a class of protocols that can be shown secure, though not necessarily with efficient simulation. We show that this class contains non-trivial protocols that cannot be shown secure by running a classical simulator in superposition.
In 2013, Boneh and Zhandry introduced the notion of indistinguishability (IND) in chosen plaintext (CPA) and chosen ciphertext (CCA) attacks by a quantum adversary which is given superposition access to an oracle for encryption and decryption queries but is restricted to classical queries in the challenge phase. In this paper we define IND-CPA and IND-CCA notions for symmetric encryption schemes where the adversary has full quantum superposition access to the oracle, and give constructions that achieve these security notions. Our results are formulated in the concrete security framework.
Functional encryption is a powerful cryptographic primitive that enables fine-grained access to encrypted data and underlies numerous applications. Although the ideal security notion for FE, simulation security, has been shown to be impossible in the plain classical setting, those impossibility results rely on inherently classical arguments. This raises a fundamental question: can simulation-secure FE be realized in the quantum regime or in alternative models?
We resolve both directions of this question. On the negative side, we show that the classical impossibility results largely extend to the quantum setting. When the adversary can submit an unbounded number of challenge messages, we establish an unconditional impossibility, matching the classical barrier. In the case where the adversary may obtain many functional keys, classical arguments only yield impossibility under the assumption of pseudorandom functions; we strengthen this by proving impossibility under the potentially weaker assumption of pseudorandom quantum states. We additionally give an independent impossibility based solely on public-key encryption with classical public-keys. Since public-key encryption is not known to imply pseudorandom states, this yields complementary evidence of the barrier and, in particular, establishes unconditional impossibility of public-key functional encryption with classical public-keys. A key technical ingredient in our proofs is a novel incompressibility property for pseudorandom states, which may be of independent interest.
On the positive side, we show how to circumvent these fundamental barriers in memory-restricted models, where the adversary's quantum or classical memory is bounded. In this setting, we obtain new feasibility results for simulation-secure FE that allow many challenge ciphertexts or many functional key queries.
In a recent seminal work, Bitansky and Shmueli (STOC '20) gave the first construction of a constant round zero-knowledge argument for NP secure against quantum attacks. However, their construction has several drawbacks compared to the classical counterparts. Specifically, their construction only achieves computational soundness, requires strong assumptions of quantum hardness of learning with errors (QLWE assumption) and the existence of quantum fully homomorphic encryption (QFHE), and relies on non-black-box simulation. In this paper, we resolve these issues at the cost of weakening the notion of zero-knowledge to what is called ε-zero-knowledge. Concretely, we construct the following protocols: - We construct a constant round interactive proof for NP that satisfies statistical soundness and black-box ε-zero-knowledge against quantum attacks assuming the existence of collapsing hash functions, which is a quantum counterpart of collision-resistant hash functions. Interestingly, this construction is just an adapted version of the classical protocol by Goldreich and Kahan (JoC '96) though the proof of ε-zero-knowledge property against quantum adversaries requires novel ideas. - We construct a constant round interactive argument for NP that satisfies computational soundness and black-box ε-zero-knowledge against quantum attacks only assuming the existence of post-quantum one-way functions. At the heart of our results is a new quantum rewinding technique that enables a simulator to extract a committed message of a malicious verifier while simulating verifier's internal state in an appropriate sense.