We study quantum protocols among two distrustful parties. By adopting a rather strict definition of correctness — guaranteeing that honest players obtain their correct outcomes only — we can show that every strictly correct quantum protocol implementing a non-trivial classical primitive necessarily leaks information to a dishonest player. This extends known impossibility results to all non-trivial primitives. We provide a framework for quantifying this leakage and argue that leakage is a good measure for the privacy provided to the players by a given protocol. Our framework also covers the case where the two players are helped by a trusted third party. We show that despite the help of a trusted third party, the players cannot amplify the cryptographic power of any primitive. All our results hold even against quantum honest-but-curious adversaries who honestly follow the protocol but purify their actions and apply a different measurement at the end of the protocol. As concrete examples, we establish lower bounds on the leakage of standard universal two-party primitives such as oblivious transfer.
Our framework allows to quantify the minimum amount of leakage whereas standard impossibility proofs as the ones of @cite_21 @cite_18 @cite_3 @cite_31 @cite_25 do not in general provide such quantification since they usually assume privacy for one player in order to show that the protocol must be totally insecure for the other player Trade-offs between the security for one and the security for the other player have been considered before, but either the relaxation of security has to be very small @cite_3 or the trade-offs are restricted to particular primitives such as commitments @cite_41 @cite_27 or oblivious transfer @cite_17 . . By contrast, we derive lower bounds for the leakage of any implementation. At first glance, our approach seems contradictory with standard impossibility proofs since embeddings leak the same amount towards both parties. To resolve this apparent paradox it suffices to observe that in previous approaches only the adversary purified its actions whereas in our case both parties do. If a honest player does not purify his actions then some leakage may be lost by the act of irreversibly and unnecessarily measuring some of his quantum registers.
@cite_18 @cite_41 @cite_21 @cite_3 @cite_27 @cite_31 @cite_25 @cite_17
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A tunable measure for information leakage called maximal a-leakage is introduced. This measure quantifies the maximal gain of an adversary in refining a tilted version of its prior belief of any (potentially random) function of a dataset conditioning on a disclosed dataset. The choice of @math determines the specific adversarial action ranging from refining a belief for @math to guessing the best posterior for @math , and for these extremal values this measure simplifies to mutual information (MI) and maximal leakage (MaxL), respectively. For all other @math this measure is shown to be the Arimoto channel capacity. Several properties of this measure are proven including: (i) quasi-convexity in the mapping between the original and disclosed datasets; (ii) data processing inequalities; and (iii) a composition property. A full version of this paper is in [1]. Oblivious transfer is a fundamental primitive in cryptography. While perfect information theoretic security is impossible, quantum oblivious transfer protocols can limit the dishonest player's cheating. Finding the optimal security parameters in such protocols is an important open question. In this paper we show that every 1-out-of-2 oblivious transfer protocol allows a dishonest party to cheat with probability bounded below by a constant strictly larger than 1 2. Alice's cheating is defined as her probability of guessing Bob's index, and Bob's cheating is defined as his probability of guessing both input bits of Alice. In our proof, we relate these cheating probabilities to the cheating probabilities of a bit commitment protocol and conclude by using lower bounds on quantum bit commitment. Then, we present an oblivious transfer protocol with two messages and cheating probabilities at most 3 4. Last, we extend Kitaev's semidefinite programming formulation to more general primitives, where the security is against a dishonest player trying to force the outcome of the other player, and prove optimal lower and upper bounds for them. Consider two parties Alice and Bob, who hold private inputs x and y, and wish to compute a function f(x, y) privately in the information theoretic sense; that is, each party should learn nothing beyond f(x, y). However, the communication channel available to them is noisy. This means that the channel can introduce errors in the transmission between the two parties. Moreover, the channel is adversarial in the sense that it knows the protocol that Alice and Bob are running, and maliciously introduces errors to disrupt the communication, subject to some bound on the total number of errors. A fundamental question in this setting is to design a protocol that remains private in the presence of large number of errors. If Alice and Bob are only interested in computing f(x, y) correctly, and not privately, then quite robust protocols are known that can tolerate a constant fraction of errors. However, none of these solutions is applicable in the setting of privacy, as they inherently leak information about the parties' inputs. This leads to the question whether we can simultaneously achieve privacy and error-resilience against a constant fraction of errors. We show that privacy and error-resilience are contradictory goals. In particular, we show that for every constant c > 0, there exists a function f which is privately computable in the error-less setting, but for which no private and correct protocol is resilient against a c-fraction of errors. The same impossibility holds also for sub-constant noise rate, e.g., when c is exponentially small (as a function of the input size). In this paper, we provide a proof of unconditional security for a semi-quantum key distribution protocol introduced in a previous work. This particular protocol demonstrated the possibility of using X basis states to contribute to the raw key of the two users (as opposed to using only direct measurement results) even though a semi-quantum participant cannot directly manipulate such states. In this work, we provide a complete proof of security by deriving a lower bound of the protocol's key rate in the asymptotic scenario. Using this bound, we are able to find an error threshold value such that for all error rates less than this threshold, it is guaranteed that A and B may distill a secure secret key; for error rates larger than this threshold, A and B should abort. We demonstrate that this error threshold compares favorably to several fully quantum protocols. We also comment on some interesting observations about the behavior of this protocol under certain noise scenarios.