Shor-Preskill Type Security-Proofs for Concatenated Bennett-Brassard 1984 Quantum Key Distribution Protocol

We discuss long code problems in the Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) quantum key distribution protocol and describe how they can be overcome by concatenation of the protocol. Observing that concatenated modified Lo-Chau protocol finally reduces to the concatenated BB84 protocol, we give the unconditional security of the concatenated BB84 protocol.Comment: 4 pages, RevTe

Quantum Gambling Using Two Nonorthogonal States

We give a (remote) quantum gambling scheme that makes use of the fact that quantum nonorthogonal states cannot be distinguished with certainty. In the proposed scheme, two participants Alice and Bob can be regarded as playing a game of making guesses on identities of quantum states that are in one of two given nonorthogonal states: if Bob makes a correct (an incorrect) guess on the identity of a quantum state that Alice has sent, he wins (loses). It is shown that the proposed scheme is secure against the nonentanglement attack. It can also be shown heuristically that the scheme is secure in the case of the entanglement attack.Comment: no essential correction, 4 pages, RevTe

Single-shot security for one-time memories in the isolated qubits model

One-time memories (OTM's) are simple, tamper-resistant cryptographic devices, which can be used to implement sophisticated functionalities such as one-time programs. Can one construct OTM's whose security follows from some physical principle? This is not possible in a fully-classical world, or in a fully-quantum world, but there is evidence that OTM's can be built using "isolated qubits" -- qubits that cannot be entangled, but can be accessed using adaptive sequences of single-qubit measurements. Here we present new constructions for OTM's using isolated qubits, which improve on previous work in several respects: they achieve a stronger "single-shot" security guarantee, which is stated in terms of the (smoothed) min-entropy; they are proven secure against adversaries who can perform arbitrary local operations and classical communication (LOCC); and they are efficiently implementable. These results use Wiesner's idea of conjugate coding, combined with error-correcting codes that approach the capacity of the q-ary symmetric channel, and a high-order entropic uncertainty relation, which was originally developed for cryptography in the bounded quantum storage model.Comment: v2: to appear in CRYPTO 2014. 21 pages, 3 figure

Top management team characteristics and life insurer performance: Do top managers make a difference?

This study examines the impact of top management team characteristics on life insurer performance. The authors argue that greater social cohesion among team members makes it less likely that the insurer will be able to adapt to the changes that have characterized the U.S. life insurance industry over the past decade and will, therefore, be detrimental to performance. Our findings support this assertion and suggest that life insurers driven by more diversified top management teams outperform life insurers with more homogenous top management teams