Cloning Games, Black Holes and Cryptography

Abstract

In this work, we introduce a new toolkit for analyzing cloning games, a notion that captures stronger and more quantitative versions of the celebrated quantum no-cloning theorem. This framework allows us to analyze a new cloning game based on binary phase states. Our results provide evidence that these games may be able to overcome important limitations of previous candidates based on BB84 states and subspace coset states: in a model where the adversaries are restricted to making a single oracle query, we show that the binary phase variant is $t$-copy secure when $t=o(n/\log n)$. Moreover, for constant $t$, we obtain the first optimal bounds of $O(2^{-n})$, asymptotically matching the value attained by a trivial adversarial strategy. We also show a worst-case to average-case reduction which allows us to show the same quantitative results for the new and natural notion of Haar cloning games. Our analytic toolkit, which we believe will find further applications, is based on binary subtypes and uses novel bounds on the operator norms of block-wise tensor products of matrices. To illustrate the effectiveness of these new techniques, we present two applications: first, in black-hole physics, where our asymptotically optimal bound offers quantitative insights into information scrambling in idealized models of black holes; and second, in unclonable cryptography, where we (a) construct succinct unclonable encryption schemes from the existence of pseudorandom unitaries, and (b) propose and provide evidence for the security of multi-copy unclonable encryption schemes.