We study the class of protocols for weak quantum coin flipping introduced by Spekkens and Rudolph (quant-ph/0202118). We show that, for any protocol in this class, one party can win the coin flip with probability at least $1/\sqrt{2}$.
We study the class of protocols for weak quantum coin flipping introduced by Spekkens and Rudolph (quant-ph/0202118). We show that, for any protocol in this class, one party can win the coin flip with probability at least 1/2.
We present a new protocol and two lower bounds for quantum coin flipping. In our protocol, no dishonest party can achieve one outcome with probability more than 0.75. Then, we show that our protocol is optimal for a certain type of quantum protocols. For arbitrary quantum protocols, we show that if a protocol achieves a bias of at most ε, it must use at least Ω(loglogε1) rounds of communication. This implies that the parallel repetition fails for quantum coin flipping. (The bias of a protocol cannot be arbitrarily decreased by running several copies of it in parallel.)
This note presents a quantum protocol that demonstrates that_weak_ coin flipping with bias approximately 0.239, less than 1/4, is possible. A bias of 1/4 was the smallest known, and followed from the strong coin flipping protocol of [Ambainis 2001]. Protocols with yet smaller bias, approximately 0.207, have independently been discovered [Ambainis 2001, Spekkens and Rudolph 2002]. We also present an alternative strong coin flipping protocol with bias 1/4 with analysis simpler than that of [Ambainis 2001].
We present a family of protocols for flipping a coin over a telephone in a quantum mechanical setting. The family contains protocols with n + 2 messages for all n > 1, and asymptotically achieves a bias of 0.192. The case n = 2 is equivalent to the protocol of Spekkens and Rudolph with bias 0.207, which was the best known protocol. The case n = 3 achieves a bias of 0.199, and n = 8 achieves a bias of 0.193. The analysis of the protocols uses Kitaev's description of coin-flipping as a semidefinite program. We construct an analytical solution to the dual problem which provides an upper bound on the amount that a party can cheat.
Coin flipping and bit commitment are two fundamental cryptographic primitives with numerous applications. Quantum information allows for such protocols in the information theoretic setting where no dishonest party can perfectly cheat. The previously best-known quantum coin flipping and bit commitment protocol by Ambainis achieved a cheating probability of at most 3/4 [A. Ambainis, Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, Washington, DC, IEEE Computer Society, 2001]. On the other hand, Kitaev showed that no quantum coin flipping or bit commitment protocol can have cheating probability less than 1/2 [A. Kitaev, Presentation at the 6th Workshop on Quantum Information Processing (QIP), 2003]. Closing these gaps has been one of the important open questions in quantum cryptography. In this paper, we resolve both questions. First, we present a quantum strong coin flipping protocol with cheating probability arbitrarily close to 1/2. More precisely, we show how to use any weak coin flipping protocol with cheating probability 1/2+ε in order to achieve a strong coin flipping protocol with cheating probability 1/2+O(ε). The optimal quantum strong coin flipping protocol follows from our construction and the optimal quantum weak coin flipping protocol described by [C. Mochon, arXiv:0711.4114, 2007]. Second, we provide the optimal bound for quantum bit commitment. On the one hand, we show a lower bound of approximately γ≈0.739, improving Kitaev's lower bound. On the other hand, we present an optimal quantum bit commitment protocol which has cheating probability arbitrarily close to γ. More precisely, we show how to use any weak coin flipping protocol with cheating probability 1/2+ε in order to achieve a quantum bit commitment protocol with cheating probability γ+O(ε). To obtain the final protocol, we then use the optimal quantum weak coin flipping protocol described by [C. Mochon, arXiv:0711.4114, 2007]. Unlike the previous protocol for coin flipping, our protocol uses quantum effects beyond the weak coin flip. To stress this fact, we additionally show that any classical bit commitment protocol with access to perfect weak (or strong) coin flipping has cheating probability at least 3/4.