How to relate quantum position verification to information-theoretic cryptography, and new steps towards practical implementation

QuICS Seminar

Speaker: 
Florian Speelman (University of Amsterdam)
Time: 
Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 11:00am
Location: 
ATL 3100A and Virtual Via Zoom

The task of quantum position verification (QPV) deploys quantum information with the aim to use a party's position as a cryptographic credential. One well-studied proposed protocol for this task, f-routing, involves a mixture of classical information and a single quantum bit that has to be routed somewhere as a function of the classical information.

In information-theoretic cryptography, the conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) task has been previously studied in the context of private information retrieval. I will present results which show that the natural quantum analogue to CDS turns out to be equivalent to f-routing, connecting these disparate topics and letting us translate results in both directions.

Besides the in-depth explanation of this cryptographic connection, I will also give a short overview of how to adapt QPV protocols, such as f-routing, to a more-practical setting - where in addition to the attacker's resources we need to handle experimental constraints such as photon loss on the side of an honest prover.

(Based on https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16462 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12614.)

*We strongly encourage attendees to use their full name (and if possible, their UMD credentials) to join the zoom session.*