arXiv subjects

Hoi-Kwong Lo

Publications and source records attributed to Hoi-Kwong Lo.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2004

Some Attacks On Quantum-based Cryptographic Protocols

Quantum-based cryptographic protocols are often said to enjoy security guaranteed by the fundamental laws of physics. However, even carefully designed quantum-based cryptographic schemes may be susceptible to subtle attacks that are outside the original design. As an example, we give attacks against a recently proposed ``secure communication using mesoscopic coherent states'', which employs mesoscopic states, rather than single-photon states. Our attacks can be used either as a known-plaintext attack or in the case where the plaintext has not been randomized. One of our attacks requires beamsplitters and the replacement of a lossy channel by a lossless one. It is successful provided that the original loss in the channel is so big that Eve can obtain 2^k copies of what Bob receives, where k is the length of the seed key pre-shared by Alice and Bob. Substantial improvements over such an exhaustive key search attack can be made, whenever a key is reused. Furthermore, we remark that, under the same assumption of a known or non-random plaintext, Grover's exhaustive key search attack can be applied directly to "secure communication using mesoscopic coherent states", whenever the channel loss is more than 50 percent. Therefore, as far as information-theoretic security is concerned, optically amplified signals necessarily degrade the security of the proposed scheme, when the plaintext is known or non-random. Our attacks apply even if the mesoscopic scheme is used only for key generation with a subsequent use of the key for one-time-pad encryption.

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arXiv2003

Why Quantum Information Processing

In this brief note, I will consider the following questions: (1) What is QIP? (2) Why QIP is interesting? (3) What QIP can do? (4) What QIP cannot do? (5) What are the major challenges in QIP?

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arXiv2002

Proof of security of quantum key distribution with two-way classical communications

Shor and Preskill have provided a simple proof of security of the standard quantum key distribution scheme by Bennett and Brassard (BB84) by demonstrating a connection between key distribution and entanglement purification protocols with one-way communications. Here we provide proofs of security of standard quantum key distribution schemes, BB84 and the six-state scheme, against the most general attack, by using the techniques of *two*-way entanglement purification. We demonstrate clearly the advantage of classical post-processing with two-way classical communications over classical post-processing with only one-way classical communications in QKD. This is done by the explicit construction of a new protocol for (the error correction/detection and privacy amplification of) BB84 that can tolerate a bit error rate of up to 18.9%, which is higher than what any BB84 scheme with only one-way classical communications can possibly tolerate. Moreover, we demonstrate the advantage of the six-state scheme over BB84 by showing that the six-state scheme can strictly tolerate a higher bit error rate than BB84. In particular, our six-state protocol can tolerate a bit error rate of 26.4%, which is higher than the upper bound of 25% bit error rate for any secure BB84 protocol. Consequently, our protocols may allow higher key generation rate and remain secure over longer distances than previous protocols. Our investigation suggests that two-way entanglement purification is a useful tool in the study of advantage distillation, error correction, and privacy amplification protocols.

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arXiv2002

A tight lower bound on the classical communication cost of entanglement dilution

Entanglement concentration requires no classical communication, but the best prior art result for diluting to N copies of a partially entangled state requires an amount of communication on the order of sqrt(N) bits. Our main result is to prove this prior art result optimal up to a constant factor; any procedure for creating N partially entangled states from singlets requires Omega(sqrt(N)) bits of classical communication. Previously not even a constant bound was known for approximate entanglement transforms. We also prove a lower bound on the inefficiency of the process: to dilute singlets to N copies of a partially entangled state, the entropy of entanglement must decrease by Omega(sqrt(N)).

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arXiv2002

Method for decoupling error correction from privacy amplification

Entanglement purification provides a unifying framework for proving the security of quantum key distribution schemes. Nonetheless, up till now, a local commutability constraint in the CSS code construction means that the error correction and privacy amplification procedures of BB84 are not fully decoupled. Here, I provide a method to decouple the two processes completely. The method requires Alice and Bob to share some initial secret string and use it to encrypt the bit-flip error syndrome using one-time-pad encryption. As an application, I prove the unconditional security of the interactive Cascade protocol, proposed by Brassard and Salvail for error correction, modified by one-time-pad encryption of the error syndrome, and followed by the random matrix protocol for privacy amplification. This is an efficient protocol in terms of both computational power and key generation rate.

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arXiv2001

From Quantum Cheating to Quantum Security

For thousands of years, code-makers and code-breakers have been competing for supremacy. Their arsenals may soon include a powerful new weapon: quantum mechanics. We give an overview of quantum cryptology as of November 2000.

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arXiv2001

Proof of unconditional security of six-state quantum key distribution scheme

We prove the unconditional security of the standard six-state scheme for quantum key distribution (QKD). We demonstrate its unconditional security up to a bit error rate of 12.7 percents, by allowing only one-way classical communications in the error correction/privacy amplification procedure between Alice and Bob. This shows a clear advantage of the six-state scheme over another standard scheme---BB84, which has been proven to be secure up to only about 11 percents, if only one-way classical communications are allowed. Our proof technique is a generalization of that of Shor-Preskill's proof of security of BB84. We show that a advantage of the six-state scheme lies in the Alice and Bob's ability to establish rigorously from their test sample the non-trivial mutual information between the bit-flip and phase error patterns. A modified version of the degenerate quantum codes studied by DiVincenzo, Shor and Smolin is employed in our proof.

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arXiv2000

Classical Communication Cost in Distributed Quantum Information Processing - A generalization of Quantum Communication Complexity

We study the amount of classical communication needed for distributed quantum information processing. In particular, we introduce the concept of "remote preparation" of a quantum state. Given an ensemble of states, Alice's task is to help Bob in a distant laboratory to prepare a state of her choice. We find several examples of an ensemble with an entropy S where the remote preparation can be done with a communication cost lower than the amount (2S) required by standard teleportation. We conjecture that, for an arbitrary N-dimensional pure state, its remote preparation requires 2log_2 N bits of classical communication, as in standard teleportation.

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arXiv1999

Unconditional Security Of Quantum Key Distribution Over Arbitrarily Long Distances

Quantum key distribution is widely thought to offer unconditional security in communication between two users. Unfortunately, a widely accepted proof of its security in the presence of source, device and channel noises has been missing. This long-standing problem is solved here by showing that, given fault-tolerant quantum computers, quantum key distribution over an arbitrarily long distance of a realistic noisy channel can be made unconditionally secure. The proof is reduced from a noisy quantum scheme to a noiseless quantum scheme and then from a noiseless quantum scheme to a noiseless classical scheme, which can then be tackled by classical probability theory.

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arXiv1999

Will Quantum Cryptography ever become a successful technology in the marketplace?

We assess the potential of quantum cryptography as a technology. We highlight the fact that academia and real world have rather different perspectives and interests. Then, we describe the various real life forces (different types of users, vendors of crypto-systems, conventional cryptographers, governments) behind the decision of the adoption (or rejection) of quantum cryptography and their different interests. Various roadblocks to the widespread application of quantum cryptography are discussed. Those roadblocks can be fundamental, technological, psychological, commercial or political and many of them have nothing to do with the security of quantum key distribution. We argue that the future success of quantum cryptography as a technology in the marketplace lies in our ability to appreciate and to overcome those roadblocks and to answer real world criticisms on the subject.

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arXiv1999

Concentrating entanglement by local actions---beyond mean values

Suppose two distant observers Alice and Bob share a pure bipartite quantum state. By applying local operations and communicating with each other using a classical channel, Alice and Bob can manipulate it into some other states. Previous investigations of entanglement manipulations have been largely limited to a small number of strategies and their average outcomes. Here we consider a general entanglement manipulation strategy and go beyond the average property. For a pure entangled state shared between two separated persons Alice and Bob, we show that the mathematical interchange symmetry of the Schmidt decomposition can be promoted into a physical symmetry between the actions of Alice and Bob. Consequently, the most general (multi-step two-way-communications) strategy of entanglement manipulation of a pure state is, in fact, equivalent to a strategy involving only a single (generalized) measurement by Alice followed by one-way communications of its result to Bob. We also prove that strategies with one-way communications are generally more powerful than those without communications. In summary, one-way communications is necessary and sufficient for the entanglement manipulations of a pure bipartite state. The supremum probability of obtaining a maximally entangled state (of any dimension) from an arbitrary state is determined and a strategy for achieving this probability is constructed explicitly. One important question is whether collective manipulations in quantum mechanics can greatly enhance the probability of large deviations from the average behavior. We answer this question in the negative for a specific problem.

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arXiv1999

The classical communication cost of entanglement manipulation: Is entanglement an inter-convertible resource?

Entanglement bits or ``ebits'' have been proposed as a quantitative measure of a fundamental resource in quantum information processing. For such an interpretation to be valid, it is important to show that the same number of ebits in different forms or concentrations are inter-convertible in the asymptotic limit. Here we draw attention to a very important but hitherto unnoticed aspect of entanglement manipulation --- the classical communication cost. We construct an explicit procedure which demonstrates that for bi-partite pure states, in the asymptotic limit, entanglement can be concentrated or diluted with vanishing classical communication cost. Entanglement of bi-partite pure states is thus established as a truly inter-convertible resource.

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arXiv1999

A quantum analog of Huffman coding

We analyze a generalization of Huffman coding to the quantum case. In particular, we notice various difficulties in using instantaneous codes for quantum communication. Nevertheless, for the storage of quantum information, we have succeeded in constructing a Huffman-coding inspired quantum scheme. The number of computational steps in the encoding and decoding processes of N quantum signals can be made to be of polylogarithmic depth by a massively parallel implementation of a quantum gate array. This is to be compared with the O (N^3) computational steps required in the sequential implementation by Cleve and DiVincenzo of the well-known quantum noiseless block coding scheme of Schumacher. We also show that O(N^2(log N)^a) computational steps are needed for the communication of quantum information using another Huffman-coding inspired scheme where the sender must disentangle her encoding device before the receiver can perform any measurements on his signals.

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arXiv1999

A simple proof of the unconditional security of quantum key distribution

Quantum key distribution is the most well-known application of quantum cryptography. Previous proposed proofs of security of quantum key distribution contain various technical subtleties. Here, a conceptually simpler proof of security of quantum key distribution is presented. The new insight is the invariance of the error rate of a teleportation channel: We show that the error rate of a teleportation channel is independent of the signals being transmitted. This is because the non-trivial error patterns are permuted under teleportation. This new insight is combined with the recently proposed quantum to classical reduction theorem. Our result shows that assuming that Alice and Bob have fault-tolerant quantum computers, quantum key distribution can be made unconditionally secure over arbitrarily long distances even against the most general type of eavesdropping attacks and in the presence of all types of noises.

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arXiv1999

Efficient Quantum Key Distribution

We devise a simple modification that essentially doubles the efficiency of a well-known quantum key distribution scheme proposed by Bennett and Brassard (BB84). Our scheme assigns significantly different probabilities for the different polarization bases during both transmission and reception to reduce the fraction of discarded data. The actual probabilities used in the scheme are announced in public. As the number of transmitted signals increases, the efficiency of our scheme can be made to approach 100%. An eavesdropper may try to break such a scheme by eavesdropping mainly along the predominant basis. To defeat such an attack, we perform a refined analysis of accepted data: Instead of lumping all the accepted data together to estimate a single error rate, we separate the accepted data into various subsets according to the basis employed and estimate an error rate for each subset {\it individually}.

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arXiv1999

How to share a quantum secret

We investigate the concept of quantum secret sharing. In a ((k,n)) threshold scheme, a secret quantum state is divided into n shares such that any k of those shares can be used to reconstruct the secret, but any set of k-1 or fewer shares contains absolutely no information about the secret. We show that the only constraint on the existence of threshold schemes comes from the quantum "no-cloning theorem", which requires that n < 2k, and, in all such cases, we give an efficient construction of a ((k,n)) threshold scheme. We also explore similarities and differences between quantum secret sharing schemes and quantum error-correcting codes. One remarkable difference is that, while most existing quantum codes encode pure states as pure states, quantum secret sharing schemes must use mixed states in some cases. For example, if k <= n < 2k-1 then any ((k,n)) threshold scheme must distribute information that is globally in a mixed state.

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arXiv1997

Insecurity of Quantum Secure Computations

It had been widely claimed that quantum mechanics can protect private information during public decision in for example the so-called two-party secure computation. If this were the case, quantum smart-cards could prevent fake teller machines from learning the PIN (Personal Identification Number) from the customers' input. Although such optimism has been challenged by the recent surprising discovery of the insecurity of the so-called quantum bit commitment, the security of quantum two-party computation itself remains unaddressed. Here I answer this question directly by showing that all ``one-sided'' two-party computations (which allow only one of the two parties to learn the result) are necessarily insecure. As corollaries to my results, quantum one-way oblivious password identification and the so-called quantum one-out-of-two oblivious transfer are impossible. I also construct a class of functions that cannot be computed securely in any ``two-sided'' two-party computation. Nevertheless, quantum cryptography remains useful in key distribution and can still provide partial security in ``quantum money'' proposed by Wiesner.

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arXiv1997

Is Quantum Bit Commitment Really Possible?

We show that all proposed quantum bit commitment schemes are insecure because the sender, Alice, can almost always cheat successfully by using an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen type of attack and delaying her measurement until she opens her commitment.

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