arXiv subjects

Claude Crépeau

Publications and source records attributed to Claude Crépeau.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Quantum cryptography beyond key distribution: theory and experiment

Owing to its fundamental principles, quantum theory holds the promise to enhance the security of modern cryptography, from message encryption to anonymous communication, digital signatures, online banking, leader election, one-time passwords and delegated computation. While quantum key distribution (QKD) has already enabled secure key exchange over hundreds of kilometers, a myriad of other quantum-cryptographic primitives are being developed to secure future applications against quantum adversaries. This review surveys the theoretical and experimental developments in quantum cryptography beyond QKD over the decades, along with advances in secure quantum computation. It provides an intuitive classification of the main quantum primitives and their security levels, summarizes their possibilities and limits, and discusses their implementation with current photonic technology.

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arXiv2023

Zero-Knowledge MIPs using Homomorphic Commitment Schemes

A Zero-Knowledge Protocol (ZKP) allows one party to convince another party of a fact without disclosing any extra knowledge except the validity of the fact. For example, it could be used to allow a customer to prove their identity to a potentially malicious bank machine without giving away private information such as a personal identification number. This way, any knowledge gained by a malicious bank machine during an interaction cannot be used later to compromise the client's banking account. An important tool in many ZKPs is bit commitment, which is essentially a digital way for a sender to put a message in a lock-box, lock it, and send it to the receiver. Later, the key is sent for the receiver to open the lock box and read the message. This way, the message is hidden from the receiver until they receive the key, and the sender is unable to change their mind after sending the lock box. In this paper, the homomorphic properties of a particular multi-party commitment scheme are exploited to allow the receiver to perform operations on commitments, resulting in polynomial time ZKPs for two NP-Complete problems: the Subset Sum Problem and 3SAT. These ZKPs are secure with no computational restrictions on the provers, even with shared quantum entanglement. In terms of efficiency, the Subset Sum ZKP is competitive with other practical quantum-secure ZKPs in the literature, with less rounds required, and fewer computations.

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arXiv2022

Experimental relativistic zero-knowledge proofs

Protecting secrets is a key challenge in our contemporary information-based era. In common situations, however, revealing secrets appears unavoidable, for instance, when identifying oneself in a bank to retrieve money. In turn, this may have highly undesirable consequences in the unlikely, yet not unrealistic, case where the bank's security gets compromised. This naturally raises the question of whether disclosing secrets is fundamentally necessary for identifying oneself, or more generally for proving a statement to be correct. Developments in computer science provide an elegant solution via the concept of zero-knowledge proofs: a prover can convince a verifier of the validity of a certain statement without facilitating the elaboration of a proof at all. In this work, we report the experimental realisation of such a zero-knowledge protocol involving two separated verifier-prover pairs. Security is enforced via the physical principle of special relativity, and no computational assumption (such as the existence of one-way functions) is required. Our implementation exclusively relies on off-the-shelf equipment and works at both short (60 m) and long distances ($\geqslant$400 m) in about one second. This demonstrates the practical potential of multi-prover zero-knowledge protocols, promising for identification tasks and blockchain applications such as cryptocurrencies or smart contracts.

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arXiv2019

Practical Relativistic Zero-Knowledge for NP

In this work we consider the following problem: in a Multi-Prover environment, how close can we get to prove the validity of an NP statement in Zero-Knowledge ? We exhibit a set of two novel Zero-Knowledge protocols for the 3-COLorability problem that use two (local) provers or three (entangled) provers and only require them to reply two trits each. This greatly improves the ability to prove Zero-Knowledge statements on very short distances with very minimal equipment.

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arXiv2019

Non-Locality and Zero-Knowledge MIPs

The foundation of zero-knowledge is the simulator: a weak machine capable of pretending to be a weak verifier talking with all-powerful provers. To achieve this, simulators need some kind of advantage such as the knowledge of a trapdoor. In existing zero-knowledge multi-prover protocols, this advantage is essentially signalling, something that the provers are explicitly forbidden to do. In most cases, this advantage is stronger than necessary as it is possible to define a sense in which simulators need much less to simulate. We define a framework in which we can quantify the simulators' non-local advantage and exhibit examples of zero-knowledge protocols that are sound against local or entangled provers but that are not sound against no-signalling provers precisely because the no-signalling simulation strategy can be adopted by malicious provers.

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arXiv2019

On the Commitment Capacity of Unfair Noisy Channels

Noisy channels are a valuable resource from a cryptographic point of view. They can be used for exchanging secret-keys as well as realizing other cryptographic primitives such as commitment and oblivious transfer. To be really useful, noisy channels have to be consider in the scenario where a cheating party has some degree of control over the channel characteristics. Damgård et al. (EUROCRYPT 1999) proposed a more realistic model where such level of control is permitted to an adversary, the so called unfair noisy channels, and proved that they can be used to obtain commitment and oblivious transfer protocols. Given that noisy channels are a precious resource for cryptographic purposes, one important question is determining the optimal rate in which they can be used. The commitment capacity has already been determined for the cases of discrete memoryless channels and Gaussian channels. In this work we address the problem of determining the commitment capacity of unfair noisy channels. We compute a single-letter characterization of the commitment capacity of unfair noisy channels. In the case where an adversary has no control over the channel (the fair case) our capacity reduces to the well-known capacity of a discrete memoryless binary symmetric channel.

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arXiv2019

Non-Locality in Interactive Proofs

In multi-prover interactive proofs (MIPs), the verifier is usually non-adaptive. This stems from an implicit problem which we call ``contamination'' by the verifier. We make explicit the verifier contamination problem, and identify a solution by constructing a generalization of the MIP model. This new model quantifies non-locality as a new dimension in the characterization of MIPs. A new property of zero-knowledge emerges naturally as a result by also quantifying the non-locality of the simulator.

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arXiv2019

Verifier Non-Locality in Interactive Proofs

In multi-prover interactive proofs, the verifier interrogates the provers and attempts to steal their knowledge. Other than that, the verifier's role has not been studied. We have discovered that the verifier plays a much more important role than previously thought. Simply put, the verifier has the capability of providing non-local resources for the provers intrinsically. Existing MIPs' proofs of soundness implicitly depend on the fact that the verifier is not a non-local resource provider. The verifier's non-locality is a new unused tool and liability for protocol design and analysis.

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arXiv2019

The RGB No-Signalling Game

Introducing the simplest of all No-Signalling Games: the RGB Game where two verifiers interrogate two provers, Alice and Bob, far enough from each other that communication between them is too slow to be possible. Each prover may be independently queried one of three possible colours: Red, Green or Blue. Let $a$ be the colour announced to Alice and $b$ be announced to Bob. To win the game they must reply colours $x$ (resp. $y$) such that $a \neq x \neq y \neq b$. This work focuses on this new game mainly as a pedagogical tool for its simplicity but also because it triggered us to introduce a new set of definitions for reductions among multi-party probability distributions and related {locality classes}. We show that a particular winning strategy for the RGB Game is equivalent to the PR-Box of Popescu-Rohrlich and thus No-Signalling. Moreover, we use this example to define No-Signalling in a new useful way, as the intersection of two natural classes of multi-party probability distributions called one-way signalling. We exhibit a quantum strategy able to beat the classical local maximum winning probability of 8/9 shifting it up to 11/12. Optimality of this quantum strategy is demonstrated using the standard tool of semidefinite programming.

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arXiv2008

Secure Multiparty Quantum Computation with (Only) a Strict Honest Majority

Secret sharing and multiparty computation (also called "secure function evaluation") are fundamental primitives in modern cryptography, allowing a group of mutually distrustful players to perform correct, distributed computations under the sole assumption that some number of them will follow the protocol honestly. This paper investigates how much trust is necessary -- that is, how many players must remain honest -- in order for distributed quantum computations to be possible. We present a verifiable quantum secret sharing (VQSS) protocol, and a general secure multiparty quantum computation (MPQC) protocol, which can tolerate any (n-1)/2 (rounded down) cheaters among n players. Previous protocols for these tasks tolerated (n-1)/4 (rounded down) and (n-1)/6 (rounded down) cheaters, respectively. The threshold we achieve is tight - even in the classical case, ``fair'' multiparty computation is not possible if any set of n/2 players can cheat. Our protocols rely on approximate quantum error-correcting codes, which can tolerate a larger fraction of errors than traditional, exact codes. We introduce new families of authentication schemes and approximate codes tailored to the needs of our protocols, as well as new state purification techniques along the lines of those used in fault-tolerant quantum circuits.

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arXiv1998

Defeating classical bit commitments with a quantum computer

It has been recently shown by Mayers that no bit commitment scheme is secure if the participants have unlimited computational power and technology. However it was noticed that a secure protocol could be obtained by forcing the cheater to perform a measurement. Similar situations had been encountered previously in the design of Quantum Oblivious Transfer. The question is whether a classical bit commitment could be used for this specific purpose. We demonstrate that, surprisingly, classical unconditionally concealing bit commitments do not help.

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arXiv1997

A brief review on the impossibility of quantum bit commitment

The desire to obtain an unconditionally secure bit commitment protocol in quantum cryptography was expressed for the first time thirteen years ago. Bit commitment is sufficient in quantum cryptography to realize a variety of applications with unconditional security. In 1993, a quantum bit commitment protocol was proposed together with a security proof. However, a basic flaw in the protocol was discovered by Mayers in 1995 and subsequently by Lo and Chau. Later the result was generalized by Mayers who showed that unconditionally secure bit commitment is impossible. A brief review on quantum bit commitment which focuses on the general impossibility theorem and on recent attempts to bypass this result is provided.

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