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arXiv:quant-ph/0210062 · Quantum Information and Computation

Uncloneable encryption

Daniel Gottesman

Published Nov 1, 2003• 53 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum states cannot be cloned. I show how to extend this property to classical messages encoded using quantum states, a task I call ``uncloneable encryption.'' An uncloneable encryption scheme has the property that an eavesdropper Eve not only cannot read the encrypted message, but she cannot copy it down for later decoding. She could steal it, but then the receiver Bob would not receive the message, and would thus be alerted that something was amiss. I prove that any authentication scheme for quantum states acts as a secure uncloneable encryption scheme. Uncloneable encryption is also closely related to quantum key distribution (QKD), demonstrating a close connection between cryptographic tasks for quantum states and for classical messages. Thus, studying uncloneable encryption and quantum authentication allows for some modest improvements in QKD protocols. While the main results apply to a one-time key with unconditional security, I also show uncloneable encryption remains secure with a pseudorandom key. In this case, to defeat the scheme, Eve must break the computational assumption behind the pseudorandom sequence before Bob receives the message, or her opportunity is lost. This means uncloneable encryption can be used in a non-interactive setting, where QKD is not available, allowing Alice and Bob to convert a temporary computational assumption into a permanently secure message.

DOI
10.26421/qic3.6-2

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Quantum states cannot be cloned. I show how to extend this property to classical messages encoded using quantum states, a task I call ``uncloneable encryption.'' An uncloneable encryption scheme has the property that an eavesdropper Eve not only cannot read the encrypted message, but she cannot copy it down for later decoding. She could steal it, but then the receiver Bob would not receive the message, and would thus be alerted that something was amiss. I prove that any authentication scheme for quantum states acts as a secure uncloneable encryption scheme. Uncloneable encryption is also closely related to quantum key distribution (QKD), demonstrating a close connection between cryptographic tasks for quantum states and for classical messages. Thus, studying uncloneable encryption and quantum authentication allows for some modest improvements in QKD protocols. While the main results apply to a one-time key with unconditional security, I also show uncloneable encryption remains secure with a pseudorandom key. In this case, to defeat the scheme, Eve must break the computational assumption behind the pseudorandom sequence before Bob receives the message, or her opportunity is lost. This means uncloneable encryption can be used in a non-interactive setting, where QKD is not available, allowing Alice and Bob to convert a temporary computational assumption into a permanently secure message.
In this note, we consider the setting of uncloneable encryption satisfying uncloneable indistinguishability, a form of symmetric key encryption that prevents the cloning of ciphertexts in a very strong sense. Our goal is to minimize the assumptions under which (many-time secure) uncloneable encryption is known to exist, assuming the existence of an information-theoretic "uncloneable bit", i.e. a one-time secure uncloneable encryption scheme for one-bit messages. We observe that if a t -> t' uncloneable bit exists, then the following implications hold. 1. If many-time secure symmetric key encryption exists, then many-time secure t -> t' uncloneable encryption for arbitrary-length messages exists. Since many-time secure uncloneable encryption implies many-time secure symmetric key encryption, this result is tight. 2. If pseudorandom unitaries exist, then many-time secure t -> t' uncloneable encryption for arbitrary-length messages with identical copy security exists. These results together show that many-time secure uncloneable encryption may follow from concrete assumptions in "microcrypt", the world of unstructured quantum cryptography that plausibly exists even if P = NP.
Unclonable Encryption, introduced by Gottesman in 2003 [Quantum Inform. Comput. 3 (2003) 581], is a quantum protocol that guarantees the secrecy of a successfully transferred classical message even when all keys leak at a later time. We propose an Unclonable Encryption protocol with the additional property that the sender’s key material is allowed to leak even in the case of an unsuccessful run. This extra feature makes it possible to achieve secure quantum encryption even when one of the parties is unable to protect its keys against after-protocol theft. Such an asymmetry occurs e.g. in case of server–client scenarios, where the client device is resource constrained and/or located in a hostile environment. Our protocol makes use of a bidirectional quantum channel in a manner similar to the two-way protocol LM05 [Phys. Rev. Lett. 94 (2005) 140501]. Bob sends random qubit states to Alice. Alice flips the states in a way that depends on the message and a shared key, and sends the resulting states back to Bob. Bob recovers Alice’s message by measuring the flips. We prove that our protocol satisfies the definition of unclonable encryption and additionally that the message remains secure even if all of Alice’s keys leak after the protocol. Furthermore, we show that some of the key materials can be safely re-used. Our security proof is formulated in terms of diamond norms, which makes it composable, and allows for noisy quantum channels. We work out the details only for the asymptotics in the limit of long messages. As a side result, we construct a two-way QKD scheme with a high key rate. We show that its key rate is higher than the rate of the two-way QKD scheme LM05 proven by Beaudry et al. [Phys. Rev. A 88 (2013) 062302] for the case of independent channel noise.
Much of the strength of quantum cryptography may be attributed to the no-cloning property of quantum information. We construct three new cryptographic primitives whose security is based on uncloneability, and that have in common that their security can be established via a novel monogamy-of-entanglement (MoE) property: - We define interactive uncloneable encryption, a version of the uncloneable encryption defined by Broadbent and Lord [TQC 2020] where the receiver must partake in an interaction with the sender in order to decrypt the ciphertext. We provide a one-round construction that is secure in the information-theoretic setting, in the sense that no other receiver may learn the message even if she eavesdrops on all the interactions. - We provide a way to make a bit string commitment scheme uncloneable. The scheme is augmented with a check step chronologically in between the commit and open steps, where an honest sender verifies that the commitment may not be opened by an eavesdropper, even if the receiver is malicious. - We construct a receiver-independent quantum key distribution (QKD) scheme, which strengthens the notion of one-sided device independent QKD of Tomamichel, Fehr, Kaniewski, and Wehner (TFKW) [NJP 2013] by also permitting the receiver's classical device to be untrusted. Explicitly, the sender remains fully trusted while only the receiver's communication is trusted. To show security, we prove an extension of the MoE property of coset states introduced by Coladangelo, Liu, Liu, and Zhandry [Crypto 2021]. In our stronger version, the player Charlie also receives Bob's answer prior to making his guess, simulating a party who eavesdrops on an interaction. To use this property, we express it as a new type of entropic uncertainty relation which arises naturally from the structure of the underlying MoE game.
One of the key distinctions between classical and quantum information is given by the no-cloning theorem: unlike bits, arbitrary qubits cannot be perfectly copied. This fact has been the inspiration for many quantum cryptographic protocols. In this thesis, we introduce a new cryptographic functionality called uncloneable encryption. This functionality allows the encryption of a classical message such that two collaborating but non-communicating adversaries may not both simultaneously recover the message, even when the encryption key is revealed. We achieve this functionality by using Wiesner’s conjugate coding scheme to encrypt the message. We show that the adversaries cannot both obtain all the necessary information for the correct decryption with high probability. Quantum-secure pseudorandom functions, modelled as random oracles, are then used to ensure that any partial information that the adversaries obtain does not give them an advantage in recovering the message.
A quantum public-key encryption scheme is presented in this paper. In the proposed scheme, ciphertext is described by quantum states and security of this scheme is based on the assumption that NP-complete (NP-C) problems are intractable against quantum (probabilistic) polynomial-time Turing machines (QPTM). One of the main properties of our scheme is that it is immune to off-line attack, in which the adversaries can copy all the ciphertext on channel and analyze them at a later time. We call this type of encryption scheme the computationally secure uncloneable encryption scheme. It is shown that the presented scheme can also be used to encrypt quantum states.
We establish quantum uncloneable encryption with unconditional security, preventing two non-communicating adversaries from simultaneously decrypting a single ciphertext −-− even when both are given the key. Our construction achieves security that approaches the ideal limit at a rate that is exponentially small in the security parameter, without employing any assumptions. Our proof invokes unitary invariance of the shared entangled state and simplifies the adversarial strategies by enforcing this symmetry. Crucially, it then rules out the sender being highly correlated with two non-communicating adversaries at once by an approximation property that we develop, for such unitarily invariant states, which yields a near-optimal bound on the probability of cloning. Consequently, no coordinated strategy beats random guessing of the encrypted bit, establishing unconditional uncloneability. This reveals the existence of an uncloneable bit in Nature and delineates a fundamental, physically enforced cryptographic primitive unavailable in classical settings.