66 research outputs found
Brief History of Quantum Cryptography: A Personal Perspective
Quantum cryptography is the only approach to privacy ever proposed that
allows two parties (who do not share a long secret key ahead of time) to
communicate with provably perfect secrecy under the nose of an eavesdropper
endowed with unlimited computational power and whose technology is limited by
nothing but the fundamental laws of nature. This essay provides a personal
historical perspective on the field. For the sake of liveliness, the style is
purposely that of a spontaneous after-dinner speech.Comment: 14 pages, no figure
Towards Communication-Efficient Quantum Oblivious Key Distribution
Oblivious Transfer, a fundamental problem in the field of secure multi-party
computation is defined as follows: A database DB of N bits held by Bob is
queried by a user Alice who is interested in the bit DB_b in such a way that
(1) Alice learns DB_b and only DB_b and (2) Bob does not learn anything about
Alice's choice b. While solutions to this problem in the classical domain rely
largely on unproven computational complexity theoretic assumptions, it is also
known that perfect solutions that guarantee both database and user privacy are
impossible in the quantum domain. Jakobi et al. [Phys. Rev. A, 83(2), 022301,
Feb 2011] proposed a protocol for Oblivious Transfer using well known QKD
techniques to establish an Oblivious Key to solve this problem. Their solution
provided a good degree of database and user privacy (using physical principles
like impossibility of perfectly distinguishing non-orthogonal quantum states
and the impossibility of superluminal communication) while being loss-resistant
and implementable with commercial QKD devices (due to the use of SARG04).
However, their Quantum Oblivious Key Distribution (QOKD) protocol requires a
communication complexity of O(N log N). Since modern databases can be extremely
large, it is important to reduce this communication as much as possible. In
this paper, we first suggest a modification of their protocol wherein the
number of qubits that need to be exchanged is reduced to O(N). A subsequent
generalization reduces the quantum communication complexity even further in
such a way that only a few hundred qubits are needed to be transferred even for
very large databases.Comment: 7 page
Probabilistic versions of Quantum Private Queries
The no-go theorem regarding unconditionally secure Quantum Bit Commitment
protocols is a relevant result in quantum cryptography. Such result has been
used to prove the impossibility of unconditional security for other protocols,
such as Quantum Oblivious Transfer or One-Sided Two Party Computation. In this
paper, we formally define two non-deterministic versions of Quantum Private
Queries, a protocol addressing the Symmetric-Private Information Retrieval
problem. We show that the strongest variant of such scheme is formally
equivalent to Quantum Bit Commitment, Quantum Oblivious Transfer and One-Sided
Two Party Computation protocols. This equivalence serves as conclusive evidence
of the impracticality of achieving unconditionally secure Strong Probabilistic
Quantum Private Queries
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