arXiv subjects

James Bartusek

Publications and source records attributed to James Bartusek.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

On the Cryptographic Structure Required for Verifying Qubits

Classically testing for the presence of anti-commuting operators on a quantum device is a critical tool underpinning recent progress in classical verification of quantum computation. While such tests can be based on cryptographic assumptions, known constructions rely on highly structured assumptions, e.g. trapdoor claw-free functions. In this work, we seek to explain this state of affairs by constructing strong cryptography from (certain forms of) classical tests of anti-commutation. In particular, we formulate the notion of a test of non-commutation (ToNC), an interactive protocol between a quantum prover and classical verifier in which the prover's final-round response is obtained by measuring one of two binary observables $P_0,P_1$ depending on the verifier's challenge bit $c$. We prove that, for a broad range of parameters, ToNC implies classical-communication key agreement (KA), and ToNC combined with one-way functions implies oblivious transfer (OT). Along the way, we develop tools for and provide the first known results on hardness amplification for post-quantum KA and OT, where communication is classical but adversaries may be quantum. In particular, we prove the following results of independent interest. - Post-quantum hard-core measure theorem: For any efficiently sampleable high-min-entropy distribution $D$ over pairs $(x,b)$ such that quantum circuits have advantage at most $\delta$ in predicting $b$ from $x$, there exists a sub-distribution $M\preceq D$ of density $(1-\delta)$ on which $b$ is nearly optimally quantum-hard to predict. - Post-quantum interactive XOR lemma: Given any classically-interactive protocol, if quantum adversaries have advantage at most $\delta$ in guessing a private challenger bit $b$, then two sequential repetitions reduce the advantage for predicting the XOR of the challenger bits $b_1\oplus b_2$ to at most $\delta^2+\rm{negl}(\lambda)$.

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arXiv2026

A Modular Approach to Succinct Arguments for QMA

Succinct argument systems are of central importance to modern crytpography, enabling the efficient verification of computational claims. In the classical setting, Kilian (STOC 92) established that any probabilistically checkable proof for NP can be transformed into a succinct argument system for NP using only collision-resistant hash functions. In the quantum setting, recent works have established the feasibility of (classically-verifiable) succinct arguments for QMA, capturing statements that require *quantum* proofs. However, known constructions all rely on the highly structured assumption of learning with errors (LWE), which stands in stark contrast with the unstructured assumptions that suffice for NP. In this work, we develop a new framework that broadens the cryptographic foundations of succinct arguments for QMA. We assume the existence of (i) an oblivious state preparation (OSP) protocol, which in turn can be constructed from *plain* trapdoor claw-free functions, and (ii) collapsing hash functions, the quantum analogue of collision-resistance. In particular, we obtain the first succinct, classically-verifiable argument system for QMA which does not rely on the hardness of LWE. Our construction proceeds in two steps. First, we design a *round-efficient* classically-verifiable argument system for QMA based only on the assumption of OSP. Second, we introduce a *generalized communication compression compiler*, which, assuming collapsing hash functions, transforms any $T$-round interactive protocol into one in which the communication size is bounded by $T \cdot \poly(\secp)$ for some fixed $\poly$ independent of the original size of each message. Our compiler extends a quantum rigidity-based communication compression technique of Zhang (QCrypt 25), and may be of independent interest.

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arXiv2026

How To Track Qubits Through Space and Time (Or: Sailing in a Quantum Boat)

While quantum position verification aims to certify a prover's location using quantum information, existing security definitions only guarantee that part of the successful adversarial party is in the claimed location. This leaves open the possibility that a distributed team of adversaries can jointly simulate a prover in a way that defeats the intended meaning of ``being at a location'' in position-based cryptography. We introduce stronger notions of position verification that we call quantum localization, which requires that there is a specified, unclonable state at the verified spacetime point -- and that this state can be found nowhere else. We show that quantum localization leads naturally to a meaningful notion of trajectory verification, in which quantum information is verifiably tracked through space and time. We construct quantum localization and trajectory verification protocols using quantum anchor states, which generalize coset states from unclonable cryptography. The security of our schemes is proven in the classical oracle (i.e. ideal obfuscation) model, which can be heuristically instantiated in the plain model using post-quantum indistinguishability obfuscation. We also introduce and instantiate the concept of functionality localization, which guarantees that the adversary has the ability to compute a secret function at the verified spacetime point, and this function cannot be computed anywhere else. This raises the intriguing possibility of localizing computational capabilities in space and time. More broadly, we believe our notions of quantum localization and our feasibility results provide stronger foundations for position-based cryptography.

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arXiv2026

A Note on Boosting Uncloneable Encryption in Microcrypt

In this note, we consider the setting of uncloneable encryption satisfying uncloneable indistinguishability, a form of symmetric key encryption that prevents the cloning of ciphertexts in a very strong sense. Our goal is to minimize the assumptions under which (many-time secure) uncloneable encryption is known to exist, assuming the existence of an information-theoretic "uncloneable bit", i.e. a one-time secure uncloneable encryption scheme for one-bit messages. We observe that if a t -> t' uncloneable bit exists, then the following implications hold. 1. If many-time secure symmetric key encryption exists, then many-time secure t -> t' uncloneable encryption for arbitrary-length messages exists. Since many-time secure uncloneable encryption implies many-time secure symmetric key encryption, this result is tight. 2. If pseudorandom unitaries exist, then many-time secure t -> t' uncloneable encryption for arbitrary-length messages with identical copy security exists. These results together show that many-time secure uncloneable encryption may follow from concrete assumptions in "microcrypt", the world of unstructured quantum cryptography that plausibly exists even if P = NP.

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arXiv2026

Unclonable Encryption in the Haar Random Oracle Model

We construct unclonable encryption (UE) in the Haar random oracle model, where all parties have query access to $U,U^\dagger,U^*,U^T$ for a Haar random unitary $U$. Our scheme satisfies the standard notion of unclonable indistinguishability security, supports reuse of the secret key, and can encrypt arbitrary-length messages. That is, we give the first evidence that (reusable) UE, which requires computational assumptions, exists in "microcrypt", a world where one-way functions may not exist. As one of our central technical contributions, we build on the recently introduced path recording framework to prove a natural ``unitary reprogramming lemma'', which may be of independent interest.

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arXiv2025

Classical Obfuscation of Quantum Circuits via Publicly-Verifiable QFHE

A classical obfuscator for quantum circuits is a classical program that, given the classical description of a quantum circuit $Q$, outputs the classical description of a functionally equivalent quantum circuit $\hat{Q}$ that hides as much as possible about $Q$. Previously, the only known feasibility result for classical obfuscation of quantum circuits (Bartusek and Malavolta, ITCS 2022) was limited to circuits that always reject. On the other hand, if the obfuscator is allowed to compile the quantum circuit $Q$ into a quantum state $|\hat{Q}\rangle$, there exist feasibility results for obfuscating all pseudo-deterministic quantum circuits (Bartusek, Kitagawa, Nishimaki and Yamakawa, STOC 2023, Bartusek, Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan, STOC 2024), and all unitaries (Huang and Tang, FOCS 2025). We show that (relative to a classical oracle) there exists a classical obfuscator for all pseudo-deterministic quantum circuits. We do this by giving the first construction of a compact quantum fully-homomorphic encryption (QFHE) scheme that supports public verification of (pseudo-deterministic) quantum evaluation, relative to a classical oracle. To construct our QFHE scheme, we improve on the approach of Bartusek, Kitagawa, Nishimaki and Yamakawa (STOC 2023), which required ciphertexts that are both quantum and non-compact due to the use of quantum coset states and their publicly-verifiable properties. We introduce new techniques for analyzing coset states that can be generated ''on the fly'', by proving new cryptographic properties of the one-shot signature scheme of Shmueli and Zhandry (CRYPTO 2025). Our techniques allow us to produce QFHE ciphertexts that are purely classical, compact, and publicly-verifiable. This also yields the first classical verification of quantum computation protocol for BQP that simultaneously satisfies blindness and public-verifiability.

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arXiv2025

A New Approach to Arguments of Quantum Knowledge

We construct a publicly-verifiable non-interactive zero-knowledge argument system for QMA with the following properties. 1. Transparent setup. Our protocol only requires a uniformly random string (URS) setup. The only prior publicly-verifiable NIZK for QMA (Bartusek and Malavolta, ITCS 2022) requires an entire obfuscated program as the common reference string. 2. Extractability. Valid QMA witnesses can be extracted directly from our accepting proofs. That is, we obtain a publicly-verifiable non-interactive argument of quantum knowledge, previously only known in a privately-verifiable setting (Coladangelo, Vidick, and Zhang, CRYPTO 2020). Our construction introduces a novel ZX QMA verifier with "strong completeness" and builds upon the coset state authentication scheme from (Bartusek, Brakerski, and Vaikuntanathan, STOC 2024) within the context of QMA verification. Along the way, we establish new properties of the authentication scheme. The security of our construction rests on the heuristic use of a post-quantum indistinguishability obfuscator. Rather than rely on the full-fledged classical oracle model (i.e. ideal obfuscation), we isolate a particular game-based property of the obfuscator that suffices for our proof, which we dub the evasive composability heuristic. As an additional contribution, we study a general method for replacing heuristic use of obfuscation with heuristic use of hash functions in the post-quantum setting. In particular, we establish security of the ideal obfuscation scheme of Jain, Lin, Luo, and Wichs (CRYPTO 2023) in the quantum pseudorandom oracle model (QPrO), which can be heuristically instantiated with a hash function. This gives us NIZK arguments of quantum knowledge for QMA in the QPrO, and additionally allows us to translate several quantum-cryptographic results that were only known in the classical oracle model to results in the QPrO.

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arXiv2024

On the Power of Oblivious State Preparation

We put forth Oblivious State Preparation (OSP) as a cryptographic primitive that unifies techniques developed in the context of a quantum server interacting with a classical client. OSP allows a classical polynomial-time sender to input a choice of one out of two public observables, and a quantum polynomial-time receiver to recover an eigenstate of the corresponding observable -- while keeping the sender's choice hidden from any malicious receiver. We obtain the following results: - The existence of (plain) trapdoor claw-free functions implies OSP, and the existence of dual-mode trapdoor claw-free functions implies round-optimal (two-round) OSP. - OSP implies the existence of proofs of quantumness, test of a qubit, blind classical delegation of quantum computation, and classical verification of quantum computation. - Two-round OSP implies quantum money with classical communication, classically-verifiable position verification, and (additionally assuming classical FHE with log-depth decryption) quantum FHE. Several of these applications were previously only known via tailored LWE-based constructions, whereas our OSP-based constructions yield new results from a wider variety of assumptions, including hard problems on cryptographic group actions. Finally, towards understanding the minimal hardness assumptions required to realize OSP, we prove the following: - OSP implies oblivious transfer between one classical and one quantum party. - Two-round OSP implies public-key encryption with classical keys and ciphertexts. In particular, these results help to ''explain'' the use of public-key cryptography in the known approaches to establishing a ''classical leash'' on a quantum server. For example, combined with a result of Austrin et al. (CRYPTO 22), we conclude that perfectly-correct OSP cannot exist unconditionally in the (quantum) random oracle model.

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arXiv2024

On the Communication Complexity of Secure Multi-Party Computation With Aborts

A central goal of cryptography is Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC), where $n$ parties desire to compute a function of their joint inputs without letting any party learn about the inputs of its peers. Unfortunately, it is well-known that MPC guaranteeing output delivery to every party is infeasible when a majority of the parties are malicious. In fact, parties operating over a point-to-point network (i.e. without access to a broadcast channel) cannot even reach an agreement on the output when more than one third of the parties are malicious (Lamport, Shostak, and Pease, JACM 1980). Motivated by this infeasibility in the point-to-point model, Goldwasser and Lindell (J. Cryptol 2005) introduced a definition of MPC that does not require agreement, referred to as MPC with selective abort. Under this definition, any party may abort the protocol if they detect malicious behavior. They showed that MPC with selective abort is feasible for any number of malicious parties by implementing a broadcast functionality with abort. While the model of MPC with abort has attracted much attention over the years, little is known about its communication complexity over point-to-point networks. In this work, we study the communication complexity of MPC with abort and devise nearly-optimal communication efficient protocols in this model. Namely, we prove trade-offs between the number of honest parties $h$, the communication complexity, and the locality of the protocols. Here, locality is a bound on the number of peers with which each party must communicate.

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arXiv2024

Secret Sharing with Certified Deletion

Secret sharing allows a user to split a secret into many shares so that the secret can be recovered if, and only if, an authorized set of shares is collected. Although secret sharing typically does not require any computational hardness assumptions, its security does require that an adversary cannot collect an authorized set of shares. Over long periods of time where an adversary can benefit from multiple data breaches, this may become an unrealistic assumption. We initiate the systematic study of secret sharing with certified deletion in order to achieve security even against an adversary that eventually collects an authorized set of shares. In secret sharing with certified deletion, a (classical) secret is split into quantum shares which can be verifiably destroyed. We define two natural notions of security: no-signaling security and adaptive security. Next, we show how to construct (i) a secret sharing scheme with no-signaling certified deletion for any monotone access structure, and (ii) a threshold secret sharing scheme with adaptive certified deletion. Our first construction uses Bartusek and Khurana's (CRYPTO 2023) 2-out-of-2 secret sharing scheme with certified deletion as a building block, while our second construction is built from scratch and requires several new technical ideas. For example, we significantly generalize the ``XOR extractor'' of Agarwal, Bartusek, Khurana, and Kumar (EUROCRYPT 2023) in order to obtain high rate seedless extraction from certain quantum sources of entropy.

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arXiv2024

Quantum State Obfuscation from Classical Oracles

A major unresolved question in quantum cryptography is whether it is possible to obfuscate arbitrary quantum computation. Indeed, there is much yet to understand about the feasibility of quantum obfuscation even in the classical oracle model, where one is given for free the ability to obfuscate any classical circuit. In this work, we develop a new array of techniques that we use to construct a quantum state obfuscator, a powerful notion formalized recently by Coladangelo and Gunn (arXiv:2311.07794) in their pursuit of better software copy-protection schemes. Quantum state obfuscation refers to the task of compiling a quantum program, consisting of a quantum circuit $C$ with a classical description and an auxiliary quantum state $\ketψ$, into a functionally-equivalent obfuscated quantum program that hides as much as possible about $C$ and $\ketψ$. We prove the security of our obfuscator when applied to any pseudo-deterministic quantum program, i.e. one that computes a (nearly) deterministic classical input / classical output functionality. Our security proof is with respect to an efficient classical oracle, which may be heuristically instantiated using quantum-secure indistinguishability obfuscation for classical circuits. Our result improves upon the recent work of Bartusek, Kitagawa, Nishimaki and Yamakawa (STOC 2023) who also showed how to obfuscate pseudo-deterministic quantum circuits in the classical oracle model, but only ones with a completely classical description. Furthermore, our result answers a question of Coladangelo and Gunn, who provide a construction of quantum state indistinguishability obfuscation with respect to a quantum oracle. Indeed, our quantum state obfuscator together with Coladangelo-Gunn gives the first candidate realization of a ``best-possible'' copy-protection scheme for all polynomial-time functionalities.

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arXiv2023

Obfuscation of Pseudo-Deterministic Quantum Circuits

We show how to obfuscate pseudo-deterministic quantum circuits in the classical oracle model, assuming the quantum hardness of learning with errors. Given the classical description of a quantum circuit $Q$, our obfuscator outputs a quantum state $\ket{\widetilde{Q}}$ that can be used to evaluate $Q$ repeatedly on arbitrary inputs. Instantiating the classical oracle using any candidate post-quantum indistinguishability obfuscator gives us the first candidate construction of indistinguishability obfuscation for all polynomial-size pseudo-deterministic quantum circuits. In particular, our scheme is the first candidate obfuscator for a class of circuits that is powerful enough to implement Shor's algorithm (SICOMP 1997). Our approach follows Bartusek and Malavolta (ITCS 2022), who obfuscate \emph{null} quantum circuits by obfuscating the verifier of an appropriate classical verification of quantum computation (CVQC) scheme. We go beyond null circuits by constructing a publicly-verifiable CVQC scheme for quantum \emph{partitioning} circuits, which can be used to verify the evaluation procedure of Mahadev's quantum fully-homomorphic encryption scheme (FOCS 2018). We achieve this by upgrading the one-time secure scheme of Bartusek (TCC 2021) to a fully reusable scheme, via a publicly-decodable \emph{Pauli functional commitment}, which we formally define and construct in this work. This commitment scheme, which satisfies a notion of binding against committers that can access the receiver's standard and Hadamard basis decoding functionalities, is constructed by building on techniques of Amos, Georgiou, Kiayias, and Zhandry (STOC 2020) introduced in the context of equivocal but collision-resistant hash functions.

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arXiv2023

Publicly-Verifiable Deletion via Target-Collapsing Functions

We build quantum cryptosystems that support publicly-verifiable deletion from standard cryptographic assumptions. We introduce target-collapsing as a weakening of collapsing for hash functions, analogous to how second preimage resistance weakens collision resistance; that is, target-collapsing requires indistinguishability between superpositions and mixtures of preimages of an honestly sampled image. We show that target-collapsing hashes enable publicly-verifiable deletion (PVD), proving conjectures from [Poremba, ITCS'23] and demonstrating that the Dual-Regev encryption (and corresponding fully homomorphic encryption) schemes support PVD under the LWE assumption. We further build on this framework to obtain a variety of primitives supporting publicly-verifiable deletion from weak cryptographic assumptions, including: - Commitments with PVD assuming the existence of injective one-way functions, or more generally, almost-regular one-way functions. Along the way, we demonstrate that (variants of) target-collapsing hashes can be built from almost-regular one-way functions. - Public-key encryption with PVD assuming trapdoored variants of injective (or almost-regular) one-way functions. We also demonstrate that the encryption scheme of [Hhan, Morimae, and Yamakawa, Eurocrypt'23] based on pseudorandom group actions has PVD. - $X$ with PVD for $X \in \{$attribute-based encryption, quantum fully-homomorphic encryption, witness encryption, time-revocable encryption$\}$, assuming $X$ and trapdoored variants of injective (or almost-regular) one-way functions.

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arXiv2023

Weakening Assumptions for Publicly-Verifiable Deletion

We develop a simple compiler that generically adds publicly-verifiable deletion to a variety of cryptosystems. Our compiler only makes use of one-way functions (or one-way state generators, if we allow the public verification key to be quantum). Previously, similar compilers either relied on the use of indistinguishability obfuscation (Bartusek et. al., ePrint:2023/265) or almost-regular one-way functions (Bartusek, Khurana and Poremba, arXiv:2303.08676).

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arXiv2023

Cryptography with Certified Deletion

We propose a new, unifying framework that yields an array of cryptographic primitives with certified deletion. These primitives enable a party in possession of a quantum ciphertext to generate a classical certificate that the encrypted plaintext has been information-theoretically deleted, and cannot be recovered even given unbounded computational resources. - For X \in {public-key, attribute-based, fully-homomorphic, witness, timed-release}, our compiler converts any (post-quantum) X encryption to X encryption with certified deletion. In addition, we compile statistically-binding commitments to statistically-binding commitments with certified everlasting hiding. As a corollary, we also obtain statistically-sound zero-knowledge proofs for QMA with certified everlasting zero-knowledge assuming statistically-binding commitments. - We also obtain a strong form of everlasting security for two-party and multi-party computation in the dishonest majority setting. While simultaneously achieving everlasting security against all parties in this setting is known to be impossible, we introduce everlasting security transfer (EST). This enables any one party (or a subset of parties) to dynamically and certifiably information-theoretically delete other participants' data after protocol execution. We construct general-purpose secure computation with EST assuming statistically-binding commitments, which can be based on one-way functions or pseudorandom quantum states. We obtain our results by developing a novel proof technique to argue that a bit b has been information-theoretically deleted from an adversary's view once they output a valid deletion certificate, despite having been previously information-theoretically determined by the ciphertext they held in their view. This technique may be of independent interest.

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arXiv2023

Secure Computation with Shared EPR Pairs (Or: How to Teleport in Zero-Knowledge)

Can a sender non-interactively transmit one of two strings to a receiver without knowing which string was received? Does there exist minimally-interactive secure multiparty computation that only makes (black-box) use of symmetric-key primitives? We provide affirmative answers to these questions in a model where parties have access to shared EPR pairs, thus demonstrating the cryptographic power of this resource. First, we construct a one-shot (i.e., single message) string oblivious transfer (OT) protocol with random receiver bit in the shared EPR pairs model, assuming the (sub-exponential) hardness of LWE. Building on this, we show that {\em secure teleportation through quantum channels} is possible. Specifically, given the description of any quantum operation $Q$, a sender with (quantum) input $ρ$ can send a single classical message that securely transmits $Q(ρ)$ to a receiver. That is, we realize an ideal quantum channel that takes input $ρ$ from the sender and provably delivers $Q(ρ)$ to the receiver without revealing any other information. This immediately gives a number of applications in the shared EPR pairs model: (1) non-interactive secure computation of unidirectional \emph{classical} randomized functionalities, (2) NIZK for QMA from standard (sub-exponential) hardness assumptions, and (3) a non-interactive \emph{zero-knowledge} state synthesis protocol. Next, we construct a two-round (round-optimal) secure multiparty computation protocol for classical functionalities in the shared EPR pairs model that is \emph{unconditionally-secure} in the (quantum-accessible) random oracle model.

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arXiv2022

A New Framework for Quantum Oblivious Transfer

We present a new template for building oblivious transfer from quantum information that we call the "fixed basis" framework. Our framework departs from prior work (eg., Crepeau and Kilian, FOCS '88) by fixing the correct choice of measurement basis used by each player, except for some hidden trap qubits that are intentionally measured in a conjugate basis. We instantiate this template in the quantum random oracle model (QROM) to obtain simple protocols that implement, with security against malicious adversaries: 1. Non-interactive random-input bit OT in a model where parties share EPR pairs a priori. 2. Two-round random-input bit OT without setup, obtained by showing that the protocol above remains secure even if the (potentially malicious) OT receiver sets up the EPR pairs. 3. Three-round chosen-input string OT from BB84 states without entanglement or setup. This improves upon natural variations of the CK88 template that require at least five rounds. Along the way, we develop technical tools that may be of independent interest. We prove that natural functions like XOR enable seedless randomness extraction from certain quantum sources of entropy. We also use idealized (i.e. extractable and equivocal) bit commitments, which we obtain by proving security of simple and efficient constructions in the QROM.

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arXiv2022

Succinct Classical Verification of Quantum Computation

We construct a classically verifiable succinct interactive argument for quantum computation (BQP) with communication complexity and verifier runtime that are poly-logarithmic in the runtime of the BQP computation (and polynomial in the security parameter). Our protocol is secure assuming the post-quantum security of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) and Learning with Errors (LWE). This is the first succinct argument for quantum computation in the plain model; prior work (Chia-Chung-Yamakawa, TCC '20) requires both a long common reference string and non-black-box use of a hash function modeled as a random oracle. At a technical level, we revisit the framework for constructing classically verifiable quantum computation (Mahadev, FOCS '18). We give a self-contained, modular proof of security for Mahadev's protocol, which we believe is of independent interest. Our proof readily generalizes to a setting in which the verifier's first message (which consists of many public keys) is compressed. Next, we formalize this notion of compressed public keys; we view the object as a generalization of constrained/programmable PRFs and instantiate it based on indistinguishability obfuscation. Finally, we compile the above protocol into a fully succinct argument using a (sufficiently composable) succinct argument of knowledge for NP. Using our framework, we achieve several additional results, including - Succinct arguments for QMA (given multiple copies of the witness), - Succinct non-interactive arguments for BQP (or QMA) in the quantum random oracle model, and - Succinct batch arguments for BQP (or QMA) assuming post-quantum LWE (without iO).

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