The Quantum Bit Commitment Theorem

Jun Yan

Chi-Yee Cheung

It is generally believed that unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment (QBC) is proven impossible by a "no-go theorem". We point out that the theorem only establishes the existence of a cheating unitary transformation in any QBC scheme secure against the receiver, but this fact alone is not sufficient to rule out unconditionally secure QBC as a matter of principle, because there exists no proof that the cheating unitary transformation must be known to the cheater in all possible cases. In this work, we show how to circumvent the "no-go theorem" and prove that unconditionally secure QBC is in fact possible.

Louis Salvail

Xin Sun, Feifei He, Quanlong Wang

Bit commitment is a cryptographic task in which Alice commits a bit to Bob such that she cannot change the value of the bit after her commitment and Bob cannot learn the value of the bit before Alice opens her commitment. According to the Mayers–Lo–Chau (MLC) no-go theorem, ideal bit commitment is impossible within quantum theory. In the information theoretic-reconstruction of quantum theory, the impossibility of quantum bit commitment is one of the three information-theoretic constraints that characterize quantum theory. In this paper, we first provide a very simple proof of the MLC no-go theorem and its quantitative generalization. Then, we formalize bit commitment in the theory of dagger monoidal categories. We show that in the setting of dagger monoidal categories, the impossibility of bit commitment is equivalent to the unitary equivalence of purification.

Louis Salvail

Horace P. Yuen

The commitment of bits between two mutually distrustful parties is a powerful cryptographic primitive with which many cryptographic objectives can be achieved. It is widely believed that unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment is impossible due to quantum entanglement cheating, which is codified in a general impossibility theorem. Gaps in the proof of this impossibility theorem are found. An unconditionally secure bit commitment protocol utilizing anonymous quantum states and the no-clone theorem is presented below with a full security proof.