Quantum entropic security and approximate quantum encryption

We present full generalisations of entropic security and entropic indistinguishability to the quantum world where no assumption but a limit on the knowledge of the adversary is made. This limit is quantified using the quantum conditional min-entropy as introduced by Renato Renner. A proof of the equivalence between the two security definitions is presented. We also provide proofs of security for two different cyphers in this model and a proof for a lower bound on the key length required by any such cypher. These cyphers generalise existing schemes for approximate quantum encryption to the entropic security model.Comment: Corrected mistakes in the proofs of Theorems 3 and 6; results unchanged. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Entanglement sampling and applications

A natural measure for the amount of quantum information that a physical system E holds about another system A = A_1,...,A_n is given by the min-entropy Hmin(A|E). Specifically, the min-entropy measures the amount of entanglement between E and A, and is the relevant measure when analyzing a wide variety of problems ranging from randomness extraction in quantum cryptography, decoupling used in channel coding, to physical processes such as thermalization or the thermodynamic work cost (or gain) of erasing a quantum system. As such, it is a central question to determine the behaviour of the min-entropy after some process M is applied to the system A. Here we introduce a new generic tool relating the resulting min-entropy to the original one, and apply it to several settings of interest, including sampling of subsystems and measuring in a randomly chosen basis. The sampling results lead to new upper bounds on quantum random access codes, and imply the existence of "local decouplers". The results on random measurements yield new high-order entropic uncertainty relations with which we prove the optimality of cryptographic schemes in the bounded quantum storage model.Comment: v3: fixed some typos, v2: fixed minor issue with the definition of entropy and improved presentatio

A decoupling approach to classical data transmission over quantum channels

Most coding theorems in quantum Shannon theory can be proven using the decoupling technique: to send data through a channel, one guarantees that the environment gets no information about it; Uhlmann's theorem then ensures that the receiver must be able to decode. While a wide range of problems can be solved this way, one of the most basic coding problems remains impervious to a direct application of this method: sending classical information through a quantum channel. We will show that this problem can, in fact, be solved using decoupling ideas, specifically by proving a "dequantizing" theorem, which ensures that the environment is only classically correlated with the sent data. Our techniques naturally yield a generalization of the Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland Theorem to the one-shot scenario, where a quantum channel can be applied only once

A father protocol for quantum broadcast channels

A new protocol for quantum broadcast channels based on the fully quantum Slepian-Wolf protocol is presented. The protocol yields an achievable rate region for entanglement-assisted transmission of quantum information through a quantum broadcast channel that can be considered the quantum analogue of Marton's region for classical broadcast channels. The protocol can be adapted to yield achievable rate regions for unassisted quantum communication and for entanglement-assisted classical communication; in the case of unassisted transmission, the region we obtain has no independent constraint on the sum rate, only on the individual transmission rates. Regularized versions of all three rate regions are provably optimal.Comment: Typo in statement of Theorem 4 fixe

The decoupling approach to quantum information theory

Quantum information theory studies the fundamental limits that physical laws impose on information processing tasks such as data compression and data transmission on noisy channels. This thesis presents general techniques that allow one to solve many fundamental problems of quantum information theory in a unified framework. The central theorem of this thesis proves the existence of a protocol that transmits quantum data that is partially known to the receiver through a single use of an arbitrary noisy quantum channel. In addition to the intrinsic interest of this problem, this theorem has as immediate corollaries several central theorems of quantum information theory. The following chapters use this theorem to prove the existence of new protocols for two other types of quantum channels, namely quantum broadcast channels and quantum channels with side information at the transmitter. These protocols also involve sending quantum information partially known by the receiver with a single use of the channel, and have as corollaries entanglement-assisted and unassisted asymptotic coding theorems. The entanglement-assisted asymptotic versions can, in both cases, be considered as quantum versions of the best coding theorems known for the classical versions of these problems. The last chapter deals with a purely quantum phenomenon called locking. We demonstrate that it is possible to encode a classical message into a quantum state such that, by removing a subsystem of logarithmic size with respect to its total size, no measurement can have significant correlations with the message. The message is therefore "locked" by a logarithmic-size key. This thesis presents the first locking protocol for which the success criterion is that the trace distance between the joint distribution of the message and the measurement result and the product of their marginals be sufficiently small.Comment: PhD Thesis, Universit\'e de Montr\'eal, defended December 2009. 133 pages