Public-key cryptography based on bounded quantum reference frames

Abstract

We demonstrate that the framework of bounded quantum reference frames has application to building quantum-public-key cryptographic protocols and proving their security. Thus, the framework we introduce can be seen as a public-key analogue of the framework of Bartlett et al. (Phys. Rev. A 70, 032307), where a private shared reference frame is shown to have cryptographic application. The protocol we present in this paper is an identification scheme, which, like a digital signature scheme, is a type of authentication scheme. We prove that our protocol is both reusable and secure under the honest-verifier assumption. Thus, we also demonstrate that secure reusable quantum-public-key authentication is possible to some extent.

v3: added proof that individual attacks on protocol rounds are sufficient; to appear in Theoretical Computer Science (special issue on QKD)