arXiv subjects

Christian Schaffner

Publications and source records attributed to Christian Schaffner.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Integrity from Algebraic Manipulation Detection in Trusted-Repeater QKD Networks

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) allows secure communication without relying on computational assumptions, but can currently only be deployed over relatively short distances due to hardware constraints. To extend QKD over long distances, networks of trusted repeater nodes can be used, wherein QKD is executed between neighbouring nodes and messages between non-neighbouring nodes are forwarded using a relay protocol. Although these networks are being deployed worldwide, no protocol exists which provides provable guarantees of integrity against manipulation from both external adversaries and corrupted intermediates. In this work, we present the first protocol that provably provides both confidentiality and integrity. Our protocol combines an existing cryptographic technique, Algebraic Manipulation Detection (AMD) codes, with multi-path relaying over trusted repeater networks. This protocol achieves Information Theoretic Security (ITS) against the detection of manipulation, which we prove formally through a sequence of games.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Irrelevant carrots and non-existent sticks: trust, governance, and security in the transition to quantum-safe systems

Quantum computing poses an urgent and widely recognised threat to global cybersecurity, enabling encrypted government, financial, and healthcare data harvested today to be decrypted in the near future. Transitioning to quantum-safe cryptography is therefore essential, demanding coordinated action across a complex, multi-actor innovation system. Drawing on insights from an expert workshop in Amsterdam, this study develops a socially informed vision for a quantum-safe future and analyses the current innovation landscape to identify critical gaps and the actions needed to address them. We map twelve key actor groups involved in the migration process, finding that regulators exert the strongest direct influence, while standardisation bodies play a crucial indirect role. This research provides one of the first system-level mappings of actors, influence pathways and governance responsibilities shaping the quantum-safe transition, revealing several responsibilities with unclear ownership. Although centred on the Netherlands, our findings are applicable to other national contexts navigating quantum-safe transitions.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

QKD Oracles for Authenticated Key Exchange

Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) establishes shared ('symmetric') cryptographic keys which are essential for secure online communication. AKE protocols can be constructed from public-key cryptography like Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs). Another approach is to use Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) to establish a symmetric key, which uses quantum communication. Combining post-quantum AKE and QKD appropriately may provide security against quantum attacks even if only one of the two approaches turns out to be secure. We provide an extensive review of existing security analyses for combined AKE and their formal security models, and identify some gaps in their treatment of QKD key IDs. In particular, improper handling of QKD key IDs leads to Dependent-Key attacks on AKE. As our main conceptual contribution, we model QKD as an oracle that closely resembles the standard ETSI 014 QKD interface. We demonstrate the usability of our QKD oracle for cryptographic security analyses by integrating it into a prominent security model for AKE, called CK+ model, thereby obtaining a security model for combined AKE that catches Dependent-Key attacks. In this model, we formally prove security of a new protocol that combines QKD with a triple-KEM handshake. This is the first provably secure hybrid protocol that maintains information-theoretic security of QKD.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

The Value of Flexibility in a Carbon Neutral Power System

In this paper, we use a formulation of the generation expansion planning problem with hourly temporal resolution, to investigate the impact of the availability of different sources of flexibility on a carbon-neutral central European power system (with a focus on Switzerland) for the year 2040. We assess the role of flexible generation, load shifting and imports on the investment and operation of existing and newly built units. Our results show that including load shifting as part of the optimization could reduce the need for investments in both RES and conventional technologies. The combination of newly built flexible generators (gas turbines) and load shifting increases the flexibility of the simulated power system and results in the overall lowest system costs. The reduction of cross-border transmission capacity between Switzerland and its neighbors has a significant impact on the domestic operation and investments but could also affect the surrounding countries.

math.OC↗

arXiv2022

Parallel repetition of local simultaneous state discrimination

Local simultaneous state discrimination (LSSD) is a recently introduced problem in quantum information processing. Its classical version is a non-local game played by non-communicating players against a referee. Based on a known probability distribution, the referee generates one input for each of the players and keeps one secret value. The players have to guess the referee's value and win if they all do so. For this game, we investigate the advantage of no-signalling strategies over classical ones. We show numerically that for three players and binary values, no-signalling strategies cannot provide any improvement over classical ones. For a certain LSSD game based on a binary symmetric channel, we show that no-signalling strategies are strictly better when multiple simultaneous instances of the game are played. Good classical strategies for this game can be defined by codes, and good no-signalling strategies by list-decoding schemes. We expand this example game to a class of games defined by an arbitrary channel, and extend the idea of using codes and list decoding to define strategies for multiple simultaneous instances of these games. Finally, we give an expression for the limit of the exponent of the classical winning probability, and show that no-signalling strategies based on list-decoding schemes achieve this limit.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Efficient NIZKs and Signatures from Commit-and-Open Protocols in the QROM

Commit-and-open Sigma-protocols are a popular class of protocols for constructing non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments and digital-signature schemes via the Fiat-Shamir transformation. Instantiated with hash-based commitments, the resulting non-interactive schemes enjoy tight online-extractability in the random oracle model. Online extractability improves the tightness of security proofs for the resulting digital-signature schemes by avoiding lossy rewinding or forking-lemma based extraction. In this work, we prove tight online extractability in the quantum random oracle model (QROM), showing that the construction supports post-quantum security. First, we consider the default case where committing is done by element-wise hashing. In a second part, we extend our result to Merkle-tree based commitments. Our results yield a significant improvement of the provable post-quantum security of the digital-signature scheme Picnic. Our analysis makes use of a recent framework by Chung et al. [arXiv:2010.11658] for analysing quantum algorithms in the QROM using purely classical reasoning. Therefore, our results can to a large extent be understood and verified without prior knowledge of quantum information science.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Limitations on Uncloneable Encryption and Simultaneous One-Way-to-Hiding

We study uncloneable quantum encryption schemes for classical messages as recently proposed by Broadbent and Lord. We focus on the information-theoretic setting and give several limitations on the structure and security of these schemes: Concretely, 1) We give an explicit cloning-indistinguishable attack that succeeds with probability $\frac12 + μ/16$ where $μ$ is related to the largest eigenvalue of the resulting quantum ciphertexts. 2) For a uniform message distribution, we partially characterize the scheme with the minimal success probability for cloning attacks. 3) Under natural symmetry conditions, we prove that the rank of the ciphertext density operators has to grow at least logarithmically in the number of messages to ensure uncloneable security. 4) The \emph{simultaneous} one-way-to-hiding (O2H) lemma is an important technique in recent works on uncloneable encryption and quantum copy protection. We give an explicit example which shatters the hope of reducing the multiplicative "security loss" constant in this lemma to below 9/8.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Local simultaneous state discrimination

Quantum state discrimination is one of the most fundamental problems studied in quantum information theory. Applications range from channel coding to metrology and cryptography. In this work, we introduce a new variant of this task: Local Simultaneous State Discrimination (LSSD). While previous distributed variants of the discrimination problem always allowed some communication between the parties to come up with a joint answer, the parties in LSSD cannot communicate and have to simultaneously answer correctly. This simultaneity implies, e.g., that for classical states, the problem does not trivialize to a non-distributed distinguishing task. While interesting in its own right, this problem also arises in quantum cryptography. After introducing the problem, we give a number of characterization results. We give examples showing that i) the optimal strategy for local discrimination need not coincide with the optimal strategy for LSSD, even for classical states, ii) an additional entangled resource can increase the optimal success probability in LSSD, and iii) stronger-than-quantum non-signalling resources can allow for a higher success probability in some cases, compared to strategies using entanglement. Finally, we show that finding the optimal strategy in (classical) 3-party LSSD is NP-hard.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Online-Extractability in the Quantum Random-Oracle Model

We show the following generic result. Whenever a quantum query algorithm in the quantum random-oracle model outputs a classical value $t$ that is promised to be in some tight relation with $H(x)$ for some $x$, then $x$ can be efficiently extracted with almost certainty. The extraction is by means of a suitable simulation of the random oracle and works online, meaning that it is straightline, i.e., without rewinding, and on-the-fly, i.e., during the protocol execution and without disturbing it. The technical core of our result is a new commutator bound that bounds the operator norm of the commutator of the unitary operator that describes the evolution of the compressed oracle (which is used to simulate the random oracle above) and of the measurement that extracts $x$. We show two applications of our generic online extractability result. We show tight online extractability of commit-and-open $Σ$-protocols in the quantum setting, and we offer the first non-asymptotic post-quantum security proof of the textbook Fujisaki-Okamoto transformation, i.e, without adjustments to facilitate the proof.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Quantum Lazy Sampling and Game-Playing Proofs for Quantum Indifferentiability

Game-playing proofs constitute a powerful framework for non-quantum cryptographic security arguments, most notably applied in the context of indifferentiability. An essential ingredient in such proofs is lazy sampling of random primitives. We develop a quantum game-playing proof framework by generalizing two recently developed proof techniques. First, we describe how Zhandry's compressed quantum oracles~(Crypto'19) can be used to do quantum lazy sampling of a class of non-uniform function distributions. Second, we observe how Unruh's one-way-to-hiding lemma~(Eurocrypt'14) can also be applied to compressed oracles, providing a quantum counterpart to the fundamental lemma of game-playing. Subsequently, we use our game-playing framework to prove quantum indifferentiability of the sponge construction, assuming a random internal function.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

A Guide for New Program Committee Members at Theoretical Computer Science Conferences

In theoretical computer science, conferences play an important role in the scientific process. The decisions whether to accept or reject articles is taken by the program committee (PC) members. Serving on a PC for the first time can be a daunting experience. This guide will help new program-committee members to understand how the system works, and provide useful tips and guidelines. It discusses every phase of the paper-selection process, and the tasks associated to it.

cs.GL↗

arXiv2021

Non-malleability for quantum public-key encryption

Non-malleability is an important security property for public-key encryption (PKE). Its significance is due to the fundamental unachievability of integrity and authenticity guarantees in this setting, rendering it the strongest integrity-like property achievable using only PKE, without digital signatures. In this work, we generalize this notion to the setting of quantum public-key encryption. Overcoming the notorious "recording barrier" known from generalizing other integrity-like security notions to quantum encryption, we generalize one of the equivalent classical definitions, comparison-based non-malleability, and show how it can be fulfilled. In addition, we explore one-time non-malleability notions for symmetric-key encryption from the literature by defining plaintext and ciphertext variants and by characterizing their relation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

High Resolution Generation Expansion Planning Considering Flexibility Needs: The Case of Switzerland in 2030

This paper presents a static generation expansion planning formulation in which operational and investment decisions for a wide range of technologies are co-optimized from a centralized perspective. The location, type and quantity of new generation and storage capacities are provided such that system demand and flexibility requirements are satisfied. Depending on investments in new intermittent renewables (wind, PV), the flexibility requirements are adapted in order to fully capture RES integration costs and ensure normal system operating conditions. To position candidate units, we incorporate DC constraints, nodal demand and production of existing generators as well as imports and exports from other interconnected zones. To show the capabilities of the formulation, high-temporal resolution simulations are conducted on a 162-bus system consisting of the full Swiss transmission grid and aggregated neighboring countries.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

Impossibility of Quantum Virtual Black-Box Obfuscation of Classical Circuits

Virtual black-box obfuscation is a strong cryptographic primitive: it encrypts a circuit while maintaining its full input/output functionality. A remarkable result by Barak et al. (Crypto 2001) shows that a general obfuscator that obfuscates classical circuits into classical circuits cannot exist. A promising direction that circumvents this impossibility result is to obfuscate classical circuits into quantum states, which would potentially be better capable of hiding information about the obfuscated circuit. We show that, under the assumption that learning-with-errors (LWE) is hard for quantum computers, this quantum variant of virtual black-box obfuscation of classical circuits is generally impossible. On the way, we show that under the presence of dependent classical auxiliary input, even the small class of classical point functions cannot be quantum virtual black-box obfuscated.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Security of the Fiat-Shamir Transformation in the Quantum Random-Oracle Model

The famous Fiat-Shamir transformation turns any public-coin three-round interactive proof, i.e., any so-called sigma-protocol, into a non-interactive proof in the random-oracle model. We study this transformation in the setting of a quantum adversary that in particular may query the random oracle in quantum superposition. Our main result is a generic reduction that transforms any quantum dishonest prover attacking the Fiat-Shamir transformation in the quantum random-oracle model into a similarly successful quantum dishonest prover attacking the underlying sigma-protocol (in the standard model). Applied to the standard soundness and proof-of-knowledge definitions, our reduction implies that both these security properties, in both the computational and the statistical variant, are preserved under the Fiat-Shamir transformation even when allowing quantum attacks. Our result improves and completes the partial results that have been known so far, but it also proves wrong certain claims made in the literature. In the context of post-quantum secure signature schemes, our results imply that for any sigma-protocol that is a proof-of-knowledge against quantum dishonest provers (and that satisfies some additional natural properties), the corresponding Fiat-Shamir signature scheme is secure in the quantum random-oracle model. For example, we can conclude that the non-optimized version of Fish, which is the bare Fiat-Shamir variant of the NIST candidate Picnic, is secure in the quantum random-oracle model.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Secure Multi-party Quantum Computation with a Dishonest Majority

The cryptographic task of secure multi-party (classical) computation has received a lot of attention in the last decades. Even in the extreme case where a computation is performed between $k$ mutually distrustful players, and security is required even for the single honest player if all other players are colluding adversaries, secure protocols are known. For quantum computation, on the other hand, protocols allowing arbitrary dishonest majority have only been proven for $k=2$. In this work, we generalize the approach taken by Dupuis, Nielsen and Salvail (CRYPTO 2012) in the two-party setting to devise a secure, efficient protocol for multi-party quantum computation for any number of players $k$, and prove security against up to $k-1$ colluding adversaries. The quantum round complexity of the protocol for computing a quantum circuit of $\{\mathsf{CNOT, T}\}$ depth $d$ is $O(k \cdot (d + \log n))$, where $n$ is the security parameter. To achieve efficiency, we develop a novel public verification protocol for the Clifford authentication code, and a testing protocol for magic-state inputs, both using classical multi-party computation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Robust self-testing of two-qubit states

It is well-known that observing nonlocal correlations allows us to draw conclusions about the quantum systems under consideration. In some cases this yields a characterisation which is essentially complete, a phenomenon known as self-testing. Self-testing becomes particularly interesting if we can make the statement robust, so that it can be applied to a real experimental setup. For the simplest self-testing scenarios the most robust bounds come from the method based on operator inequalities. In this work we elaborate on this idea and apply it to the family of tilted CHSH inequalities. These inequalities are maximally violated by partially entangled two-qubit states and our goal is to estimate the quality of the state based only on the observed violation. For these inequalities we have reached a candidate bound and while we have not been able to prove it analytically, we have gathered convincing numerical evidence that it holds. Our final contribution is a proof that in the usual formulation, the CHSH inequality only becomes a self-test when the violation exceeds a certain threshold. This shows that self-testing scenarios fall into two distinct classes depending on whether they exhibit such a threshold or not.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2017

Transmission Network Reduction Method using Nonlinear Optimization

This paper presents a new method to determine the susceptances of a reduced transmission network representation by using nonlinear optimization. We use Power Transfer Distribution Factors (PTDFs) to convert the original grid into a reduced version, from which we determine the susceptances. From our case studies we find that considering a reduced injection-independent evaluated PTDF matrix is the best approximation and is by far better than an injection-dependent evaluated PTDF matrix over a given set of arbitrarily-chosen power injection scenarios. We also compare our nonlinear approach with existing methods from literature in terms of the approximation error and computation time. On average, we find that our approach reduces the mean error of the power flow deviations between the original power system and its reduced version, while achieving higher but reasonable computation times.

eess.SY↗