Published February 26, 2019 | Version Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Simple and tight device-independent security proofs

Abstract

Device-independent security is the gold standard for quantum cryptography: not only is security based entirely on the laws of quantum mechanics, but it holds irrespective of any a priori assumptions on the quantum devices used in a protocol, making it particularly applicable in a quantum-wary environment. While the existence of device-independent protocols for tasks such as randomness expansion and quantum key distribution has recently been established, the underlying proofs of security remain very challenging, yield rather poor key rates, and demand very high quality quantum devices, thus making them all but impossible to implement in practice. We introduce a technique for the analysis of device-independent cryptographic protocols. We provide a flexible protocol and give a security proof that provides quantitative bounds that are asymptotically tight, even in the presence of general quantum adversaries. At a high level our approach amounts to establishing a reduction to the scenario in which the untrusted device operates in an identical and independent way in each round of the protocol. This is achieved by leveraging the sequential nature of the protocol and makes use of a newly developed tool, the "entropy accumulation theorem" of Dupuis, Fawzi, and Renner [Entropy Accumulation, preprint, 2016]. As concrete applications we give simple and modular security proofs for device-independent quantum key distribution and randomness expansion protocols based on the CHSH inequality. For both tasks, we establish essentially optimal asymptotic key rates and noise tolerance. In view of recent experimental progress, which has culminated in loophole-free Bell tests, it is likely that these protocols can be practically implemented in the near future.

Additional Information

© 2019 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Submitted: 9 March 2018; Accepted: 19 December 2018; Published online: 26 February 2019. The research of the first and second authors was supported by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), by the European Commission via the project "RAQUEL," by the Swiss National Science Foundation via the National Center for Competence in Research, QSIT, and by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) via grant FA9550-16-1-0245. The third author's research was partially supported by NSF CAREER grant CCF-1553477, an AFOSR YIP award, the IQIM, and the NSF Physics Frontiers Center (NFS grant PHY-1125565) with support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF-12500028).

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Submitted - 1607.01797.pdf

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
92744
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20190206-150209557

Related works

Funding

Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS)
European Research Council (ERC)
RAQUEL
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)
FA9550-16-1-0245
NSF
CCF-1553477
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM)
NSF
PHY-1125565
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
GBMF-12500028

Dates

Created
2019-02-07
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-16
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

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