2,739 research outputs found
Using quantum key distribution for cryptographic purposes: a survey
The appealing feature of quantum key distribution (QKD), from a cryptographic
viewpoint, is the ability to prove the information-theoretic security (ITS) of
the established keys. As a key establishment primitive, QKD however does not
provide a standalone security service in its own: the secret keys established
by QKD are in general then used by a subsequent cryptographic applications for
which the requirements, the context of use and the security properties can
vary. It is therefore important, in the perspective of integrating QKD in
security infrastructures, to analyze how QKD can be combined with other
cryptographic primitives. The purpose of this survey article, which is mostly
centered on European research results, is to contribute to such an analysis. We
first review and compare the properties of the existing key establishment
techniques, QKD being one of them. We then study more specifically two generic
scenarios related to the practical use of QKD in cryptographic infrastructures:
1) using QKD as a key renewal technique for a symmetric cipher over a
point-to-point link; 2) using QKD in a network containing many users with the
objective of offering any-to-any key establishment service. We discuss the
constraints as well as the potential interest of using QKD in these contexts.
We finally give an overview of challenges relative to the development of QKD
technology that also constitute potential avenues for cryptographic research.Comment: Revised version of the SECOQC White Paper. Published in the special
issue on QKD of TCS, Theoretical Computer Science (2014), pp. 62-8
Quantum Tokens for Digital Signatures
The fisherman caught a quantum fish. "Fisherman, please let me go", begged
the fish, "and I will grant you three wishes". The fisherman agreed. The fish
gave the fisherman a quantum computer, three quantum signing tokens and his
classical public key. The fish explained: "to sign your three wishes, use the
tokenized signature scheme on this quantum computer, then show your valid
signature to the king, who owes me a favor".
The fisherman used one of the signing tokens to sign the document "give me a
castle!" and rushed to the palace. The king executed the classical verification
algorithm using the fish's public key, and since it was valid, the king
complied.
The fisherman's wife wanted to sign ten wishes using their two remaining
signing tokens. The fisherman did not want to cheat, and secretly sailed to
meet the fish. "Fish, my wife wants to sign ten more wishes". But the fish was
not worried: "I have learned quantum cryptography following the previous story
(The Fisherman and His Wife by the brothers Grimm). The quantum tokens are
consumed during the signing. Your polynomial wife cannot even sign four wishes
using the three signing tokens I gave you".
"How does it work?" wondered the fisherman. "Have you heard of quantum money?
These are quantum states which can be easily verified but are hard to copy.
This tokenized quantum signature scheme extends Aaronson and Christiano's
quantum money scheme, which is why the signing tokens cannot be copied".
"Does your scheme have additional fancy properties?" the fisherman asked.
"Yes, the scheme has other security guarantees: revocability, testability and
everlasting security. Furthermore, if you're at sea and your quantum phone has
only classical reception, you can use this scheme to transfer the value of the
quantum money to shore", said the fish, and swam away.Comment: Added illustration of the abstract to the ancillary file
Quantum Cryptography Beyond Quantum Key Distribution
Quantum cryptography is the art and science of exploiting quantum mechanical
effects in order to perform cryptographic tasks. While the most well-known
example of this discipline is quantum key distribution (QKD), there exist many
other applications such as quantum money, randomness generation, secure two-
and multi-party computation and delegated quantum computation. Quantum
cryptography also studies the limitations and challenges resulting from quantum
adversaries---including the impossibility of quantum bit commitment, the
difficulty of quantum rewinding and the definition of quantum security models
for classical primitives. In this review article, aimed primarily at
cryptographers unfamiliar with the quantum world, we survey the area of
theoretical quantum cryptography, with an emphasis on the constructions and
limitations beyond the realm of QKD.Comment: 45 pages, over 245 reference
Flow Ambiguity: A Path Towards Classically Driven Blind Quantum Computation
Blind quantum computation protocols allow a user to delegate a computation to
a remote quantum computer in such a way that the privacy of their computation
is preserved, even from the device implementing the computation. To date, such
protocols are only known for settings involving at least two quantum devices:
either a user with some quantum capabilities and a remote quantum server or two
or more entangled but noncommunicating servers. In this work, we take the first
step towards the construction of a blind quantum computing protocol with a
completely classical client and single quantum server. Specifically, we show
how a classical client can exploit the ambiguity in the flow of information in
measurement-based quantum computing to construct a protocol for hiding critical
aspects of a computation delegated to a remote quantum computer. This ambiguity
arises due to the fact that, for a fixed graph, there exist multiple choices of
the input and output vertex sets that result in deterministic measurement
patterns consistent with the same fixed total ordering of vertices. This allows
a classical user, computing only measurement angles, to drive a
measurement-based computation performed on a remote device while hiding
critical aspects of the computation.Comment: (v3) 14 pages, 6 figures. expands introduction and definition of
flow, corrects typos to increase readability; contains a new figure to
illustrate example run of CDBQC protocol; minor changes to match the
published version.(v2) 12 pages, 5 figures. Corrects motivation for
quantities used in blindness analysi
Review on DNA Cryptography
Cryptography is the science that secures data and communication over the
network by applying mathematics and logic to design strong encryption methods.
In the modern era of e-business and e-commerce the protection of
confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA triad) of stored information
as well as of transmitted data is very crucial. DNA molecules, having the
capacity to store, process and transmit information, inspires the idea of DNA
cryptography. This combination of the chemical characteristics of biological
DNA sequences and classical cryptography ensures the non-vulnerable
transmission of data. In this paper we have reviewed the present state of art
of DNA cryptography.Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, 6 table
Indistinguishability Obfuscation of Null Quantum Circuits and Applications
We study the notion of indistinguishability obfuscation for null quantum circuits (quantum null-iO). We present a construction assuming:
- The quantum hardness of learning with errors (LWE).
- Post-quantum indistinguishability obfuscation for classical circuits.
- A notion of "dual-mode" classical verification of quantum computation (CVQC). We give evidence that our notion of dual-mode CVQC exists by proposing a scheme that is secure assuming LWE in the quantum random oracle model (QROM).
Then we show how quantum null-iO enables a series of new cryptographic primitives that, prior to our work, were unknown to exist even making heuristic assumptions. Among others, we obtain the first witness encryption scheme for QMA, the first publicly verifiable non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) scheme for QMA, and the first attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme for BQP
Approximate Quantum Error-Correcting Codes and Secret Sharing Schemes
It is a standard result in the theory of quantum error-correcting codes that
no code of length n can fix more than n/4 arbitrary errors, regardless of the
dimension of the coding and encoded Hilbert spaces. However, this bound only
applies to codes which recover the message exactly. Naively, one might expect
that correcting errors to very high fidelity would only allow small violations
of this bound. This intuition is incorrect: in this paper we describe quantum
error-correcting codes capable of correcting up to (n-1)/2 arbitrary errors
with fidelity exponentially close to 1, at the price of increasing the size of
the registers (i.e., the coding alphabet). This demonstrates a sharp
distinction between exact and approximate quantum error correction. The codes
have the property that any components reveal no information about the
message, and so they can also be viewed as error-tolerant secret sharing
schemes.
The construction has several interesting implications for cryptography and
quantum information theory. First, it suggests that secret sharing is a better
classical analogue to quantum error correction than is classical error
correction. Second, it highlights an error in a purported proof that verifiable
quantum secret sharing (VQSS) is impossible when the number of cheaters t is
n/4. More generally, the construction illustrates a difference between exact
and approximate requirements in quantum cryptography and (yet again) the
delicacy of security proofs and impossibility results in the quantum model.Comment: 14 pages, no figure
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