arXiv subjects

Severin Winkler

Publications and source records attributed to Severin Winkler.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Impossibility of Quantum Private Queries

Symmetric private information retrieval is a cryptographic task allowing a user to query a database and obtain exactly one entry without revealing to the owner of the database which element was accessed. The task is a variant of general two-party protocols called one-sided secure function evaluation and is closely related to oblivious transfer. Under the name quantum private queries, quantum protocols have been proposed to solve this problem in a cheat-sensitive way: In such protocols, it is not impossible for dishonest participants to cheat, but they risk detection [V. Giovannetti, S. Lloyd, and L. Maccone, Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 230502 (2008)]. We give an explicit attack against any cheat-sensitive symmetric private information retrieval protocol, showing that any protocol that is secure for the user cannot have non-trivial security guarantees for the owner of the database.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Lower Bounds for Quantum Secure Function Evaluation Reductions

One-sided output secure function evaluation is a cryptographic primitive where the two mutually distrustful players, Alice and Bob, both have a private input to a bivariate function. Bob obtains the value of the function for the given inputs, while Alice receives no output. It is known that this primitive cannot be securely implemented if the two players only have access to noiseless classical and quantum communication. In this work, we first show that Bob can extract the function values for all his possible inputs from any implementation of a non-trivial function that is correct and preserves the privacy of Bob's input. Our result holds in the non-asymptotic setting where the players have finite resources and the error is a constant. Then we consider protocols for secure function evaluation in a setup where the two players have access to trusted distributed randomness as a resource. Building upon the first result, we prove a bound on the efficiency of such cryptographic reductions for any non-trivial function in terms of the conditional entropies of the trusted randomness. From this result, we can derive lower bounds on the number of instances of different variants of OT needed to securely implement a given function.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2014

On the Efficiency of Classical and Quantum Secure Function Evaluation

We provide bounds on the efficiency of secure one-sided output two-party computation of arbitrary finite functions from trusted distributed randomness in the statistical case. From these results we derive bounds on the efficiency of protocols that use different variants of OT as a black-box. When applied to implementations of OT, these bounds generalize most known results to the statistical case. Our results hold in particular for transformations between a finite number of primitives and for any error. In the second part we study the efficiency of quantum protocols implementing OT. While most classical lower bounds for perfectly secure reductions of OT to distributed randomness still hold in the quantum setting, we present a statistically secure protocol that violates these bounds by an arbitrarily large factor. We then prove a weaker lower bound that does hold in the statistical quantum setting and implies that even quantum protocols cannot extend OT. Finally, we present two lower bounds for reductions of OT to commitments and a protocol based on string commitments that is optimal with respect to both of these bounds.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2011

Impossibility of Growing Quantum Bit Commitments

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is often, more correctly, called key growing. Given a short key as a seed, QKD enables two parties, connected by an insecure quantum channel, to generate a secret key of arbitrary length. Conversely, no key agreement is possible without access to an initial key. Here, we consider another fundamental cryptographic task, commitments. While, similar to key agreement, commitments cannot be realized from scratch, we ask whether they may be grown. That is, given the ability to commit to a fixed number of bits, is there a way to augment this to commitments to strings of arbitrary length? Using recently developed information-theoretic techniques, we answer this question to the negative.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2010

Bit Commitment from Non-Signaling Correlations

Central cryptographic functionalities such as encryption, authentication, or secure two-party computation cannot be realized in an information-theoretically secure way from scratch. This serves as a motivation to study what (possibly weak) primitives they can be based on. We consider as such starting points general two-party input-output systems that do not allow for message transmission, and show that they can be used for realizing unconditionally secure bit commitment as soon as they are non-trivial, i.e., cannot be securely realized from distributed randomness only.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2009

Distilling Non-Locality

Two parts of an entangled quantum state can have a correlation in their joint behavior under measurements that is unexplainable by shared classical information. Such correlations are called non-local and have proven to be an interesting resource for information processing. Since non-local correlations are more useful if they are stronger, it is natural to ask whether weak non-locality can be amplified. We give an affirmative answer by presenting the first protocol for distilling non-locality in the framework of generalized non-signaling theories. Our protocol works for both quantum and non-quantum correlations. This shows that in many contexts, the extent to which a single instance of a correlation can violate a CHSH inequality is not a good measure for the usefulness of non-locality. A more meaningful measure follows from our results.

quant-ph↗