arXiv subjects

Carl A. Miller

Publications and source records attributed to Carl A. Miller.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Impossibility of perfect cheating for single-qubit position verification

In quantum position verification (QPV), a prover certifies her location to a set of verifiers by performing a quantum computation. One of the first QPV protocols was proposed by Kent, Munro, and Spiller in 2011: the prover receives a qubit $Q$ from one direction, receives an orthogonal basis $\{ v, v^\perp \}$ from the opposite direction, then measures $Q$ in $\{ v, v^\perp \}$ and broadcasts the result. Several variants of this protocol have been proposed and analyzed, but the question of whether the original protocol is secure has never been fully resolved. In this work we show that there is no perfect finite-dimensional cheating strategy for the single-qubit measurement protocol. Our proof uses tools from real algebraic geometry.

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arXiv2026

Quantum Position Verification with Remote Untrusted Devices

Position information underpins many modern technologies, from navigation and timing to authentication and critical infrastructure. However, classical methods of proving that information originates from a particular position are vulnerable to spoofing. This limitation can be overcome with quantum technologies but current protocols rely on trust in quantum hardware that can be undermined, or require quantum computers and bounds on adversarial computation. Nevertheless, there has been significant interest in experimental demonstrations, and aspects of these protocols have been implemented. Here we introduce and experimentally demonstrate the Bell-test quantum position verification protocol for device-independent quantum position verification that guarantees security with only observed correlations from a loophole-free Bell test across a quantum network. We experimentally implement a version of this device-independent protocol against adversaries who, before each trial, are weakly entangled. Our demonstration achieves a one-dimensional localization 2.47(2) times smaller than the best, necessarily non-remote, classical localization protocol. Compared to classical protocols with identical latencies, the localization volume is 4.53(5) times smaller, and represents a certifiable quantum advantage. The general Bell-test protocol is loss tolerant and secure against adversaries with significant quantum resources. This work allows digital security to be anchored to physically trusted locations, enabling new position-based authentication protocols for applications such as financial transactions, legal agreements, and securing critical infrastructure.

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arXiv2026

Hidden-State Proofs of Quantumness

An experimental cryptographic proof of quantumness will be a vital milestone in the progress of quantum information science. Error tolerance is a persistent challenge for implementing such tests: we need a test that not only can be passed by an efficient quantum prover, but one that can be passed by a prover that exhibits a certain amount of computational error. (Brakerski et al. 2018) introduced an innovative two-round proof of quantumness based on the Learning With Errors (LWE) assumption. However, one of the steps in their protocol (the pre-image test) has low tolerance for error. In this work we present a proof of quantumness which maintains the same circuit structure as (Brakerski et al. 2018) while improving the robustness for noise. Our protocol is based on cryptographically hiding an extended Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state within a sequence of classical bits. Asymptotically, our protocol allows the total probability of error within the circuit to be as high as $1 - O ( λ^{-C} )$, where $λ$ is the security parameter and $C$ is a constant that can be made arbitrarily large. As part of the proof of this result, we also prove an uncertainty principle over finite abelian groups which may be of independent interest.

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arXiv2025

Cheat-Penalised Quantum Weak Coin-Flipping

Coin-flipping is a fundamental task in two-party cryptography where two remote mistrustful parties wish to generate a shared uniformly random bit. While quantum protocols promising near-perfect security exist for weak coin-flipping -- when the parties want opposing outcomes -- it has been shown that they must be inefficient in terms of their round complexity, and it is an open question of how space efficient they can be. In this work, we consider a variant called cheat-penalised weak coin-flipping in which if a party gets caught cheating, they lose $Λ$ points (compared to $0$ in the standard definition). We find that already for a small cheating penalty, the landscape of coin-flipping changes dramatically. For example, with $Λ=0.01$, we exhibit a protocol where neither Alice nor Bob can bias the result in their favour beyond $1/2 + 10^{-8}$, which uses $24$ qubits and $10^{16}$ rounds of communication (provably $10^{7}$ times better than any weak coin-flipping protocol with matching security). For the same space requirements, we demonstrate how one can choose between lowering how much a malicious party can bias the result (down to $1/2 + 10^{-10}$) and reducing the rounds of communication (down to $25,180$), depending on what is preferred. To find these protocols, we make two technical contributions. First, we extend the point game-protocol correspondence introduced by Kitaev and Mochon, to incorporate: (i) approximate point games, (ii) the cheat-penalised setting, and (iii) round and space complexity. Second, we give the first (to the best of our knowledge) numerical algorithm for constructing (approximate) point games that correspond to high security and low complexity. Our results open up the possibility of having secure and practical quantum protocols for multiparty computation.

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arXiv2025

The membership problem for constant-sized quantum correlations is undecidable

When two spatially separated parties make measurements on an unknown entangled quantum state, what correlations can they achieve? How difficult is it to determine whether a given correlation is a quantum correlation? These questions are central to problems in quantum communication and computation. Previous work has shown that the general membership problem for quantum correlations is computationally undecidable. In the current work we show something stronger: there is a family of constant-sized correlations -- that is, correlations for which the number of measurements and number of measurement outcomes are fixed -- such that solving the quantum membership problem for this family is computationally impossible. Thus, the undecidability that arises in understanding Bell experiments is not dependent on varying the number of measurements in the experiment. This places strong constraints on the types of descriptions that can be given for quantum correlation sets. Our proof is based on a combination of techniques from quantum self-testing and from undecidability results of the third author for linear system nonlocal games.

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arXiv2024

Lattice-Based Quantum Advantage from Rotated Measurements

Trapdoor claw-free functions (TCFs) are immensely valuable in cryptographic interactions between a classical client and a quantum server. Typically, a protocol has the quantum server prepare a superposition of two-bit strings of a claw and then measure it using Pauli-$X$ or $Z$ measurements. In this paper, we demonstrate a new technique that uses the entire range of qubit measurements from the $XY$-plane. We show the advantage of this approach in two applications. First, building on (Brakerski et al. 2018, Kalai et al. 2022), we show an optimized two-round proof of quantumness whose security can be expressed directly in terms of the hardness of the LWE (learning with errors) problem. Second, we construct a one-round protocol for blind remote preparation of an arbitrary state on the $XY$-plane up to a Pauli-$Z$ correction.

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arXiv2024

Evaluating the security of CRYSTALS-Dilithium in the quantum random oracle model

In the wake of recent progress on quantum computing hardware, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is standardizing cryptographic protocols that are resistant to attacks by quantum adversaries. The primary digital signature scheme that NIST has chosen is CRYSTALS-Dilithium. The hardness of this scheme is based on the hardness of three computational problems: Module Learning with Errors (MLWE), Module Short Integer Solution (MSIS), and SelfTargetMSIS. MLWE and MSIS have been well-studied and are widely believed to be secure. However, SelfTargetMSIS is novel and, though classically as hard as MSIS, its quantum hardness is unclear. In this paper, we provide the first proof of the hardness of SelfTargetMSIS via a reduction from MLWE in the Quantum Random Oracle Model (QROM). Our proof uses recently developed techniques in quantum reprogramming and rewinding. A central part of our approach is a proof that a certain hash function, derived from the MSIS problem, is collapsing. From this approach, we deduce a new security proof for Dilithium under appropriate parameter settings. Compared to the previous work by Kiltz, Lyubashevsky, and Schaffner (EUROCRYPT 2018) that gave the only other rigorous security proof for a variant of Dilithium, our proof has the advantage of being applicable under the condition q = 1 mod 2n, where q denotes the modulus and n the dimension of the underlying algebraic ring. This condition is part of the original Dilithium proposal and is crucial for the efficient implementation of the scheme. We provide new secure parameter sets for Dilithium under the condition q = 1 mod 2n, finding that our public key size and signature size are about 2.9 times and 1.3 times larger, respectively, than those proposed by Kiltz et al. at the same security level.

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arXiv2020

The Impossibility of Efficient Quantum Weak Coin-Flipping

How can two parties with competing interests carry out a fair coin flip, using only a noiseless quantum channel? This problem (quantum weak coin-flipping) was formalized more than 15 years ago, and, despite some phenomenal theoretical progress, practical quantum coin-flipping protocols with vanishing bias have proved hard to find. In the current work we show that there is a reason that practical weak quantum coin-flipping is difficult: any quantum weak coin-flipping protocol with bias $ε$ must use at least $\exp ( Ω(1/\sqrtε ))$ rounds of communication. This is a large improvement over the previous best known lower bound of $Ω( \log \log (1/ε))$ due to Ambainis from 2004. Our proof is based on a theoretical construction (the two-variable profile function) which may find further applications.

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arXiv2019

Experimental Low-Latency Device-Independent Quantum Randomness

Applications of randomness such as private key generation and public randomness beacons require small blocks of certified random bits on demand. Device-independent quantum random number generators can produce such random bits, but existing quantum-proof protocols and loophole-free implementations suffer from high latency, requiring many hours to produce any random bits. We demonstrate device-independent quantum randomness generation from a loophole-free Bell test with a more efficient quantum-proof protocol, obtaining multiple blocks of $512$ bits with an average experiment time of less than $5$ min per block and with a certified error bounded by $2^{-64}\approx 5.42\times 10^{-20}$.

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arXiv2019

Graphical Methods in Device-Independent Quantum Cryptography

We introduce a framework for graphical security proofs in device-independent quantum cryptography using the methods of categorical quantum mechanics. We are optimistic that this approach will make some of the highly complex proofs in quantum cryptography more accessible, facilitate the discovery of new proofs, and enable automated proof verification. As an example of our framework, we reprove a previous result from device-independent quantum cryptography: any linear randomness expansion protocol can be converted into an unbounded randomness expansion protocol. We give a graphical proof of this result, and implement part of it in the Globular proof assistant.

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arXiv2019

Parallel Self-Testing of the GHZ State with a Proof by Diagrams

Quantum self-testing addresses the following question: is it possible to verify the existence of a multipartite state even when one's measurement devices are completely untrusted? This problem has seen abundant activity in the last few years, particularly with the advent of parallel self-testing (i.e., testing several copies of a state at once), which has applications not only to quantum cryptography but also quantum computing. In this work we give the first error-tolerant parallel self-test in a three-party (rather than two-party) scenario, by showing that an arbitrary number of copies of the GHZ state can be self-tested. In order to handle the additional complexity of a three-party setting, we use a diagrammatic proof based on categorical quantum mechanics, rather than a typical symbolic proof. The diagrammatic approach allows for manipulations of the complicated tensor networks that arise in the proof, and gives a demonstration of the importance of picture-languages in quantum information.

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arXiv2018

An Elementary Proof of Private Random Number Generation from Bell Inequalities

The field of device-independent quantum cryptography has seen enormous success in the past several years, including security proofs for key distribution and random number generation that account for arbitrary imperfections in the devices used. Full security proofs in the field so far are long and technically deep. In this paper we show that the concept of the mirror adversary can be used to simplify device-independent proofs. We give a short proof that any bipartite Bell violation can be used to generate private random numbers. The proof is based on elementary techniques and is self-contained.

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arXiv2018

Parallel Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution

A prominent application of quantum cryptography is the distribution of cryptographic keys that are provably secure. Recently, such security proofs were extended by Vazirani and Vidick (Physical Review Letters, 113, 140501, 2014) to the device-independent (DI) scenario, where the users do not need to trust the integrity of the underlying quantum devices. The protocols analyzed by them and by subsequent authors all require a sequential execution of N multiplayer games, where N is the security parameter. In this work, we prove unconditional security of a protocol where all games are executed in parallel. Besides decreasing the number of time-steps necessary for key generation, this result reduces the security requirements for DI-QKD by allowing arbitrary information leakage of each user's inputs within his or her lab. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first parallel security proof for a fully device-independent QKD protocol. Our protocol tolerates a constant level of device imprecision and achieves a linear key rate.

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arXiv2018

Local Randomness: Examples and Application

When two players achieve a superclassical score at a nonlocal game, their outputs must contain intrinsic randomness. This fact has many useful implications for quantum cryptography. Recently it has been observed (C. Miller, Y. Shi, Quant. Inf. & Comp. 17, pp. 0595-0610, 2017) that such scores also imply the existence of local randomness -- that is, randomness known to one player but not to the other. This has potential implications for cryptographic tasks between two cooperating but mistrustful players. In the current paper we bring this notion toward practical realization, by offering a near-optimal bound on local randomness for the CHSH game, and also proving the security of a cryptographic application of local randomness (single-bit certified deletion).

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arXiv2018

Keyring models: an approach to steerability

If a measurement is made on one half of a bipartite system, then, conditioned on the outcome, the other half has a new reduced state. If these reduced states defy classical explanation -- that is, if shared randomness cannot produce these reduced states for all possible measurements -- the bipartite state is said to be steerable. Determining which states are steerable is a challenging problem even for low dimensions. In the case of two-qubit systems a criterion is known for T-states (that is, those with maximally mixed marginals) under projective measurements. In the current work we introduce the concept of keyring models -- a special class of local hidden state models. When the measurements made correspond to real projectors, these allow us to study steerability beyond T-states. Using keyring models, we completely solve the steering problem for real projective measurements when the state arises from mixing a pure two-qubit state with uniform noise. We also give a partial solution in the case when the uniform noise is replaced by independent depolarizing channels.

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arXiv2017

Rigidity of the magic pentagram game

A game is rigid if a near-optimal score guarantees, under the sole assumption of the validity of quantum mechanics, that the players are using an approximately unique quantum strategy. Rigidity has a vital role in quantum cryptography as it permits a strictly classical user to trust behavior in the quantum realm. This property can be traced back as far as 1998 (Mayers and Yao) and has been proved for multiple classes of games. In this paper we prove ridigity for the magic pentagram game, a simple binary constraint satisfaction game involving two players, five clauses and ten variables. We show that all near-optimal strategies for the pentagram game are approximately equivalent to a unique strategy involving real Pauli measurements on three maximally-entangled qubit pairs.

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arXiv2017

Randomness in nonlocal games between mistrustful players

If two quantum players at a nonlocal game G achieve a superclassical score, then their measurement outcomes must be at least partially random from the perspective of any third player. This is the basis for device-independent quantum cryptography. In this paper we address a related question: does a superclassical score at G guarantee that one player has created randomness from the perspective of the other player? We show that for complete-support games, the answer is yes: even if the second player is given the first player's input at the conclusion of the game, he cannot perfectly recover her output. Thus some amount of local randomness (i.e., randomness possessed by only one player) is always obtained when randomness is certified from nonlocal games with quantum strategies. This is in contrast to non-signaling game strategies, which may produce global randomness without any local randomness. We discuss potential implications for cryptographic protocols between mistrustful parties.

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arXiv2016

Certified randomness between mistrustful players

It is known that if two players achieve a superclassical score at a nonlocal game $G$, then their outputs are certifiably random - that is, regardless of the strategy used by the players, a third party will not be able to perfectly predict their outputs (even if he were given their inputs). We prove that for any complete-support game $G$, there is an explicit nonzero function $F_G$ such that if Alice and Bob achieve a superclassical score of $s$ at $G$, then Bob has a probability of at most $1 - F_G ( s )$ of correctly guessing Alice's output after the game is played. Our result implies that certifying global randomness through such games must necessarily introduce local randomness.

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