Coercion is the attack where a sender is forced to reveal the plaintext and secret key corresponding to an intercepted communication. Deniable encryption mitigates this threat by allowing the sender to generate a plausible alternative message-key pair that is consistent with the ciphertext.This work presents a phase-encoded quantum one-time pad that realizes sender-deniable encryption using single-qubit superpositions. The protocol uses phase-encoded quantum superpositions, where a classical message, XORed with a secret key, is encoded into the relative phases of single-qubit states. An honest receiver can deterministically recover the message by applying a key-dependent phase correction and measuring in the Hadamard basis; meanwhile, an eavesdropper or coercer without the key observes only a maximally mixed state. Because multiple message–key pairs yield identical quantum ciphertexts, the scheme provides information-theoretic plausible deniability without relying on computational hardness assumptions. The construction requires only Hadamard and phase-flip operations, thereby avoiding entanglement or multi-qubit gates, and can be implemented as a lightweight deniability layer on top of existing Quantum Key Distribution systems. This minimalist approach extends quantum communication from confidentiality toward coercion-resistant information transfer secured by physical principles rather than computational complexity.
Coercion is the attack where a sender is forced to reveal the plaintext and secret key corresponding to an intercepted communication. Deniable encryption mitigates this threat by allowing the sender to generate a plausible alternative message-key pair that is consistent with the ciphertext.This work presents a phase-encoded quantum one-time pad that realizes sender-deniable encryption using single-qubit superpositions. The protocol uses phase-encoded quantum superpositions, where a classical message, XORed with a secret key, is encoded into the relative phases of single-qubit states. An honest receiver can deterministically recover the message by applying a key-dependent phase correction and measuring in the Hadamard basis; meanwhile, an eavesdropper or coercer without the key observes only a maximally mixed state. Because multiple message–key pairs yield identical quantum ciphertexts, the scheme provides information-theoretic plausible deniability without relying on computational hardness assumptions. The construction requires only Hadamard and phase-flip operations, thereby avoiding entanglement or multi-qubit gates, and can be implemented as a lightweight deniability layer on top of existing Quantum Key Distribution systems. This minimalist approach extends quantum communication from confidentiality toward coercion-resistant information transfer secured by physical principles rather than computational complexity.
Deniable encryption is an intriguing scheme against the problem of information leakage caused by adversary coercion. Previously proposed deniable schemes cannot resist the attack of quantum computers and there are few implementations of these schemes. Aiming at this problem, a deniable encryption scheme based on learning with errors (LWE) and related implementations were proposed. The scheme can resist the quantum attack, and also can deny the plaintext to any fake plaintext, so that the sender can resist the adversary’s coercive attack. Firstly, by using the indistinguishability of the LWE problem, a subset with low density named “translucent set” was constructed in a uniform space. The “translucent set” was used to construct the ciphertexts of bits 0 and 1, which enabled one-way deniability of a single bit and reduced the error rate. Then, a plaintext coding method was proposed to realize two-way deniability of a single bit so that the sender could deny the original plaintext to any fake plaintext. The theoretical analyses were given to show the deniability, security (IND–CPA), correctness, complexity and ciphertext expansion rate of the scheme. Finally, the scheme was implemented by C++, and experiments had been done for the error rate, ciphertext expansion rate, encryption and decryption efficiency. The experimental results showed that the error rate and ciphertext expansion rate were consistent with the theoretical results. Compared with other deniable schemes based on the quadratic residual problem, the proposed scheme has obvious advantages in anti-quantum attack, efficiency and ciphertext expansion rate. Specifically, the encryption efficiency is improved by 70%, and the ciphertext expansion rate is reduced to 1/3 of above schemes.
There is proposed a new method for deniable encryption based on commutative transformations. The method has been used to design the deniable encryption protocol resistant to the passive coercive attacks, which uses no pre-shared secret keys and no pre-exchanged public keys. The protocol begins with the stage at which the sender and receiver exchange their single-use public keys and compute the single-use shared secret key. Then, it is performed pseudo-probabilistic three-pass protocol with simultaneous commutative encryption of the fake and secret messages. Resistance of the proposed protocol to coercive attacks is provided by its computational indistinguishability from probabilistic no-key three-pass protocol used to send securely the fake message. To perform commutative encryption, it used exponentiation cipher. To provide security against active coercer, the protocol is to be complemented with procedure for authenticating the sent messages.
This poster describes ongoing work on deniability in quantum cryptography, an area of research that remains almost entirely unexplored in the quantum information processing literature. Deniability is a well-known and fundamental concept in classical cryptography and it can be defined as the ability for the sender of a message to deny the contents of a message or the very act of having participated in an exchange, e.g. having sent the said message. We discuss deniability in the context of quantum key exchange and address a particular problem, first discovered by Donald Beaver, where he claims that all QKD protocols are undeniable. The claim is that while we do get a one-time pad (OTP) using QKD, it does not provide the property of key equivocation as it is expected in the Shannon sense for a OTP. Intuitively, this difficulty lies in the quantum channel alone and it has to do with the fact that in QKD, while we generate entropy by expanding an initially short pre-shared key into an arbitrary longer secret key, we do so by exchanging information over a quantum as well as a classical channel, which could potentially leave a binding transcript of Alice's decisions to the final secret key. This is in contrast with the implicit assumption that Eve knows nothing about how two given parties have established their shared OTP in the first place. We discuss the importance of deniability in cryptography and its wide range of applications, along with cryptographic primitives other than key exchange where deniability might be a desired property. Finally, we present a series of fundamental open questions in this area of research and discuss quantum cryptographic primitives that lend themselves to devising deniable protocols.
This study shows that secret information can be shared or passed from a sender to a receiver even if not encoded in a secret message. In the protocol designed in this study, no parts of the original secret information ever travel via communication channels between the source and the destination, no encoding/decoding key is ever used. The two communicating partners, Alice and Bob, are endowed with coherent qubits that can be read and set and keep their quantum values over time. Additionally, there exists a central authority that is capable of identifying Alice and Bob to share with each half of entangled qubit pairs. The central authority also performs entanglement swapping. Our protocol relies on the assumption that public information can be protected, an assumption present in all cryptographic protocols. Also any classical communication channel need not be authenticated. As each piece of secret information has a distinct public encoding, the protocol is equivalent to a one-time pad protocol.
Quantum cryptography-the application of quantum information processing and quantum computing techniques to cryptography has been extensively investigated. Two major directions of quantum cryptography are quantum key distribution (QKD) and quantum encryption, with the former focusing on secure key distribution and the latter focusing on encryption using quantum algorithms. In contrast to the success of the QKD, the development of quantum encryption algorithms is limited to designs of mostly one-time pads (OTP) that are unsuitable for most communication needs. In this work we propose a non-OTP quantum encryption design utilizing a quantum state creation process to encrypt messages. As essentially a non-OTP quantum block cipher the method stands out against existing methods with the following features: 1. complex key-ciphertext relation (i.e. confusion) and complex plaintext-ciphertext relation (i.e. diffusion); 2. mode of operation design for practical encryption on multiple blocks. These features provide key reusability and protection against eavesdropping and standard cryptanalytic attacks.
Quantum data locking is a uniquely quantum phenomenon that allows a relatively short key of constant size to (un)lock an arbitrarily long message encoded in a quantum state, in such a way that an eavesdropper who measures the state but does not know the key has essentially no information about the message. The application of quantum data locking in cryptography would allow one to overcome the limitations of the one-time pad encryption, which requires the key to have the same length as the message. However, it is known that the strength of quantum data locking is also its Achilles heel, as the leakage of a few bits of the key or the message may in principle allow the eavesdropper to unlock a disproportionate amount of information. In this paper we show that there exist quantum data locking schemes that can be made robust against information leakage by increasing the length of the key by a proportionate amount. This implies that a constant size key can still lock an arbitrarily long message as long as a fraction of it remains secret to the eavesdropper. Moreover, we greatly simplify the structure of the protocol by proving that phase modulation suffices to generate strong locking schemes, paving the way to optical experimental realizations. Also, we show that successful data locking protocols can be constructed using random code words, which very well could be helpful in discovering random codes for data locking over noisy quantum channels.