Philippe Lamontagne

We explore the cryptographic power of arbitrary shared physical resources. The most general such resource is access to a fresh entangled quantum state at the outset of each protocol execution. We call this the Common Reference Quantum State (CRQS) model, in analogy to the well-known Common Reference String (CRS). The CRQS model is a natural generalization of the CRS model but appears to be more powerful: in the two-party setting, a CRQS can sometimes exhibit properties associated with a Random Oracle queried once by measuring a maximally entangled state in one of many mutually unbiased bases. We formalize this notion as a Weak One-Time Random Oracle (WOTRO), where we only ask of the m–bit output to have some randomness when conditioned on the n–bit input. We show that when n − m ∈ ω(lg n), any protocol for WOTRO in the CRQS model can be attacked by an (inefficient) adversary. Moreover, our adversary is efficiently simulatable, which rules out the possibility of proving the computational security of a scheme by a fully black-box reduction to a cryptographic game assumption. On the other hand, we introduce a non-game quantum assumption for hash functions that implies WOTRO in the CRQ$ model (where the CRQS consists only of EPR pairs). We first build a statistically secure WOTRO protocol where m = n, then hash the output. The impossibility of WOTRO has the following consequences. First, we show the fully-black-box impossibility of a quantum Fiat-Shamir transform, extending the impossibility result of Bitansky et al. (TCC ’13) to the CRQS model. Second, we show a fully-black-box impossibility result for a strenghtened version of quantum lightning (Zhandry, Eurocrypt ’19) where quantum bolts have an additional parameter that cannot be changed without generating new bolts. Our results also apply to 2–message protocols in the plain model.

Quantum certified deletion [BI20] has been a hot topic of quantum cryptography in recent years. Many constructions propose to add to cryptographic schemes a procedure by which one party can prove to other(s) that it has deleted a crucial piece of information. Certified deletion (CD) is almost always presented as the end-goal on its own, yet we know little about whether CD is useful in enabling other cryptographic tasks. In this note we ask the following question. What is the cryptographic power of certified deletion?

The round complexity of interactive proof systems is a key question of practical and theoretical relevance in complexity theory and cryptography. Moreover, results such as QIP = QIP(3) (STOC’00) show that quantum resources significantly help in such a task. In this work, we initiate the study of round compression of protocols in the bounded quantum storage model (BQSM). In this model, the malicious parties have a bounded quantum memory and they cannot store the all the qubits that are transmitted in the protocol Our main results in this setting are the following: 1. There is a non-interactive (statistical) witness indistinguishable proof for any language in NP (and even QMA) in BQSM in the plain model. We notice that in this protocol, only the memory of the verifier is bounded. 2. Any classical proof system can be compressed in a two-message quan- tum proof system in BQSM. Moreover, if the original proof system is zero-knowledge, the quantum protocol is zero-knowledge too. In this result, we assume that the prover has bounded memory. Finally, we give evidence towards the “tightness” of our results. First, we show that NIZK in the plain model against BQS adversaries is unlikely with standard techniques. Second, we prove that without the BQS model there is no 2–message zero-knowledge quantum interactive proof, even under computational assumptions.