The dagger lambda calculus

We present a novel lambda calculus that casts the categorical approach to the study of quantum protocols into the rich and well established tradition of type theory. Our construction extends the linear typed lambda calculus with a linear negation of "trivialised" De Morgan duality. Reduction is realised through explicit substitution, based on a symmetric notion of binding of global scope, with rules acting on the entire typing judgement instead of on a specific subterm. Proofs of subject reduction, confluence, strong normalisation and consistency are provided, and the language is shown to be an internal language for dagger compact categories.Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2014, arXiv:1412.810

ProSiBIR: Proactive Signer-Base Intrusion Resilient Signatures

The notion of Signer-Base Intrusion-Resilient (SiBIR) signatures was introduced in [IR02] as a scheme that can withstand an arbitrary number of key-exposures, as long as both of its modules are not compromised simultaneously. This was achieved by dividing time into predefined time periods, each corresponding to a different time-evolving secret key, while maintaining a constant public key. The two modules of this scheme consist of a signer that can generate signatures on its own, and a base that is used to update the signer’s key as it evolves through time. The purpose of this paper is to provide a model for multi-signer, multi-base intrusion-resilient signatures. This proactive SiBIR scheme essentially breaks the preexisting notions of signer and base, to an arbitrary number of signer and base modules. This tends to implementations where multiple parties need to agree for a document to be signed. An attacker needs to break into all the signers at the same time in order to forge a signature for that period. Moreover, he needs to break into all the bases as well, at that same time period, in order to ”break ” the scheme and generate future signatures. Thereby, by assuming a large number of bases, the risk of our scheme being compromised becomes arbitrarily small. We provide an implementation that’s provably secure in the random oracle model, based on the strong RSA assumption. We also yield a modest improvement in the upperbound of our scheme’s insecurity function, as opposed to the one presented in [IR02]

Higher-order semantics for quantum programming languages with classical control

This thesis studies the categorical formalisation of quantum computing, through the prism of type theory, in a three-tier process. The first stage of our investigation involves the creation of the dagger lambda calculus, a lambda calculus for dagger compact categories. Our second contribution lifts the expressive power of the dagger lambda calculus, to that of a quantum programming language, by adding classical control in the form of complementary classical structures and dualisers. Finally, our third contribution demonstrates how our lambda calculus can be applied to various well known problems in quantum computation: Quantum Key Distribution, the quantum Fourier transform, and the teleportation protocol./This thesis is not currently available in ORA