Quantum non-malleability and authentication

In encryption, non-malleability is a highly desirable property: it ensures that adversaries cannot manipulate the plaintext by acting on the ciphertext. Ambainis, Bouda and Winter gave a definition of non-malleability for the encryption of quantum data. In this work, we show that this definition is too weak, as it allows adversaries to "inject" plaintexts of their choice into the ciphertext. We give a new definition of quantum non-malleability which resolves this problem. Our definition is expressed in terms of entropic quantities, considers stronger adversaries, and does not assume secrecy. Rather, we prove that quantum non-malleability implies secrecy; this is in stark contrast to the classical setting, where the two properties are completely independent. For unitary schemes, our notion of non-malleability is equivalent to encryption with a two-design (and hence also to the definition of Ambainis et al.). Our techniques also yield new results regarding the closely-related task of quantum authentication. We show that "total authentication" (a notion recently proposed by Garg, Yuen and Zhandry) can be satisfied with two-designs, a significant improvement over the eight-design construction of Garg et al. We also show that, under a mild adaptation of the rejection procedure, both total authentication and our notion of non-malleability yield quantum authentication as defined by Dupuis, Nielsen and Salvail.Comment: 20+13 pages, one figure. v2: published version plus extra material. v3: references added and update

Ancilla models for quantum operations: For what unitaries does the ancilla state have to be physical?

Any evolution described by a completely positive trace-preserving linear map can be imagined as arising from the interaction of the evolving system with an initially uncorrelated ancilla. The interaction is given by a joint unitary operator, acting on the system and the ancilla. Here we study the properties such a unitary operator must have in order to force the choice of a physical- that is, positive-state for the ancilla if the end result is to be a physical-that is, completely positive-evolution of the system.Comment: Quantum Information Processing, (2012

Physical realizations of quantum operations

Quantum operations (QO) describe any state change allowed in quantum mechanics, such as the evolution of an open system or the state change due to a measurement. We address the problem of which unitary transformations and which observables can be used to achieve a QO with generally different input and output Hilbert spaces. We classify all unitary extensions of a QO, and give explicit realizations in terms of free-evolution direct-sum dilations and interacting tensor-product dilations. In terms of Hilbert space dimensionality the free-evolution dilations minimize the physical resources needed to realize the QO, and for this case we provide bounds for the dimension of the ancilla space versus the rank of the QO. The interacting dilations, on the other hand, correspond to the customary ancilla-system interaction realization, and for these we derive a majorization relation which selects the allowed unitary interactions between system and ancilla.Comment: 8 pages, no figures. Accepted for publication on Phys. Rev.

Cloning of spin-coherent states

We consider optimal cloning of the spin coherent states in Hilbert spaces of different dimensionality d. We give explicit form of optimal cloning transformation for spin coherent states in the three-dimensional space, analytical results for the fidelity of the optimal cloning in d=3 and d=4 as well as numerical results for higher dimensions. In the low-dimensional case we construct the corresponding completely positive maps and exhibit their structure with the help of Jamiolkowski isomorphism. This allows us to formulate some conjectures about the form of optimal coherent cloning CP maps in arbitrary dimension.Comment: LateX, 9 pages, 1 figur

The entanglement of purification

We introduce a measure of both quantum as well as classical correlations in a quantum state, the entanglement of purification. We show that the (regularized) entanglement of purification is equal to the entanglement cost of creating a state $\rho$ asymptotically from maximally entangled states, with negligible communication. We prove that the classical mutual information and the quantum mutual information divided by two are lower bounds for the regularized entanglement of purification. We present numerical results of the entanglement of purification for Werner states in ${\cal H}_2 \otimes {\cal H}_2$.Comment: 12 pages RevTex, 1 figure, to appear in JMP special issue on quantum information. v3 contains additional references, motivation, and a small change in the figur

Optimization of entanglement witnesses

An entanglement witness (EW) is an operator that allows to detect entangled states. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for such operators to be optimal, i.e. to detect entangled states in an optimal way. We show how to optimize general EW, and then we particularize our results to the non-decomposable ones; the latter are those that can detect positive partial transpose entangled states (PPTES). We also present a method to systematically construct and optimize this last class of operators based on the existence of ``edge'' PPTES, i.e. states that violate the range separability criterion [Phys. Lett. A{\bf 232}, 333 (1997)] in an extreme manner. This method also permits the systematic construction of non-decomposable positive maps (PM). Our results lead to a novel sufficient condition for entanglement in terms of non-decomposable EW and PM. Finally, we illustrate our results by constructing optimal EW acting on H=\C^2\otimes \C^4. The corresponding PM constitute the first examples of PM with minimal ``qubit'' domain, or - equivalently - minimal hermitian conjugate codomain.Comment: 18 pages, two figures, minor change

Test for entanglement using physically observable witness operators and positive maps

Motivated by the Peres-Horodecki criterion and the realignment criterion we develop a more powerful method to identify entangled states for any bipartite system through a universal construction of the witness operator. The method also gives a new family of positive but non-completely positive maps of arbitrary high dimensions which provide a much better test than the witness operators themselves. Moreover, we find there are two types of positive maps that can detect 2xN and 4xN bound entangled states. Since entanglement witnesses are physical observables and may be measured locally our construction could be of great significance for future experiments.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, revtex4 styl

A Factorization Law for Entanglement Decay

We present a simple and general factorization law for quantum systems shared by two parties, which describes the time evolution of entanglement upon passage of either component through an arbitrary noisy channel. The robustness of entanglement-based quantum information processing protocols is thus easily and fully characterized by a single quantity.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Characterising a universal cloning machine by maximum-likelihood estimation

We apply a general method for the estimation of completely positive maps to the 1-to-2 universal covariant cloning machine. The method is based on the maximum-likelihood principle, and makes use of random input states, along with random projective measurements on the output clones. The downhill simplex algorithm is applied for the maximisation of the likelihood functional.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure