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arXiv:quant-ph/9810067 · Physical Review Letters

Coin Tossing is Strictly Weaker than Bit Commitment

Adrian Kent

Published Dec 20, 1999• 56 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We define cryptographic assumptions applicable to two mistrustful parties who each control two or more separate secure sites between which special relativity ensures a time lapse in communication. We show that, under these assumptions, unconditionally secure coin tossing can be carried out by exchanges of classical information. We then show that, under standard cryptographic assumptions, coin tossing is strictly weaker than bit commitment. That is, no unconditionally secure bit commitment protocol can be built from a finite number of invocations of a secure coin-tossing black box together with finitely many additional classical or quantum information exchanges.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.83.5382

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We define cryptographic assumptions applicable to two mistrustful parties who each control two or more separate secure sites between which special relativity ensures a time lapse in communication. We show that, under these assumptions, unconditionally secure coin tossing can be carried out by exchanges of classical information. We then show that, under standard cryptographic assumptions, coin tossing is strictly weaker than bit commitment. That is, no unconditionally secure bit commitment protocol can be built from a finite number of invocations of a secure coin-tossing black box together with finitely many additional classical or quantum information exchanges.
A significant branch of classical cryptography deals with the problems which arise when mistrustful parties need to generate, process, or exchange information. As Kilian showed a while ago, mistrustful classical cryptography can be founded on a single protocol, oblivious transfer, from which general secure multiparty computations can be built. The scope of mistrustful quantum cryptography is limited by no-go theorems, which rule out, inter alia, unconditionally secure quantum protocols for oblivious transfer or general secure two-party computations. These theorems apply even to protocols which take relativistic signaling constraints into account. The best that can be hoped for, in general, are quantum protocols which are computationally secure against quantum attack. Here a method is described for building a classically certified bit commitment, and hence every other mistrustful cryptographic task, from a secure coin-tossing protocol. No security proof is attempted, but reasons are sketched why these protocols might resist quantum computational attack.
A significant branch of classical cryptography deals with the problems which arise when mistrustful parties need to generate, process or exchange information. As Kilian showed a while ago, mistrustful classical cryptography can be founded on a single protocol, oblivious transfer, from which general secure multi-party computations can be built. The scope of mistrustful quantum cryptography is limited by no-go theorems, which rule out, inter alia, unconditionally secure quantum protocols for oblivious transfer or general secure two-party computations. These theorems apply even to protocols which take relativistic signalling constraints into account. The best that can be hoped for, in general, are quantum protocols computationally secure against quantum attack. I describe here a method for building a classically certified bit commitment, and hence every other mistrustful cryptographic task, from a secure coin tossing protocol. No security proof is attempted, but I sketch reasons why these protocols might resist quantum computational attack.
If mistrustful parties A and B control two or more appropriately located sites, special relativity can be used to guarantee that a pair of messages exchanged by A and B are independent. Using this fact, an unconditionally secure relativistic bit commitment protocol, RBC1, was recently defined. Security is maintained in RBC1 by exchanging a sequence of messages whose transmission rate increases exponentially in time. We define here a variant, RBC2, which requires a constant transmission rate and can in practice be securely maintained for long periods. We also introduce a zero-knowledge proof protocol which allows A to convince B of the value of any function of NNN relativistic bit commitments without giving any further information. Applying this to the XOR of two bit commitments made by RBC1 or RBC2, we define two further relativistic bit commitment protocols, RBC3 and RBC4. These two protocols are permanently unconditionally secure against classical attack and require only a constant transmission rate. We conjecture that they are also unconditionally secure against quantum attack.
Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive in which Bob wishes to commit a secret bit to Alice. Perfectly secure bit commitment between two mistrustful parties is impossible through asynchronous exchange of quantum information. Perfect security is however possible when Alice and Bob split into several agents exchanging classical and quantum information at times and locations suitably chosen to satisfy specific relativistic constraints. Here we report on an implementation of a bit commitment protocol using quantum communication and special relativity. Our protocol is based on [A. Kent, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 130501 (2012)] and has the advantage that it is practically feasible with arbitrary large separations between the agents in order to maximize the commitment time. By positioning agents in Geneva and Singapore, we obtain a commitment time of 15 ms. A security analysis considering experimental imperfections and finite statistics is presented.
In coin tossing two remote participants want to share a uniformly distributed random bit. At the least in the quantum version, each participant test whether or not the other has attempted to create a bias on this bit. It is requested that, for b = 0,1, the probability that Alice gets bit b and pass the test is smaller than 1/2 whatever she does, and similarly for Bob. If the bound 1/2 holds perfectly against any of the two participants, the task realised is called an exact coin tossing. If the bound is actually 1/2+ξ1/2 + ξ1/2+ξ where the bias ξξξ vanishes when a security parameter m defined by the protocol increases, the task realised is a (non exact) coin tossing. It is found here that exact coin tossing is impossible. At the same time, an unconditionally secure quantum protocol that realises a (non exact) coin tossing is proposed. The protocol executes m biased quantum coin tossing procedures at the same time. It executes the first round in each of these m procedures sequentially, then the second rounds are executed, and so on until the end of the n procedures. Each procedure requires 4n particles where n∈O(lg⁡m)n \in O(\lg m)n∈O(lgm). The final bit x is the parity of the m random bits. The information about each of these m bits is announced a little bit at a time which implies that the principle used against bit commitment does not apply. The bias on x is smaller than 1/m1/m1/m. The result is discussed in the light of the impossibility result for exact coin tossing.
Here we propose a general relativistic quantum framework for cryptography that exploits the fascinating connection of quantum non-locality and special theory of relativity with cryptography. The underlying principle of unconditional security is causality and two-fold quantum non-local correlations: first entanglement swapping and then teleportation over causally independent entangled systems. We show that the proposed framework has following remarkable and novel features in mistrustful cryptography: (i) It helps in defining a new notion of oblivious transfer where both the data transferred and the transfer position remains oblivious. (ii) The authenticity and integrity of the data transferred is guaranteed by the fundamental principles of quantum theory instead of computational complexity. (iii) It directly leads to unconditionally secure and deterministic two-sided two-party computation which is currently considered to be impossible. (iv) the proposed framework turns out to be asynchronous ideal coin tossing with zero bias which has not been achieved previously. (v) The same framework also implies unconditionally secure bit commitment. Finally, the combination of quantum non-locality and theory of relativity as discussed here can easily be generalized to multiparty setting that could be used to solve other mistrustful cryptographic tasks such as secret sharing and key agreement securely.