Everlasting secure key agreement from a quantum computational hybrid security model

Abstract:We introduce the Quantum Computational Timelock (QCT) model, combining time-lock encryption with a quantitative noisy-quantum-storage assumption. Time-lock encryption gives Bob immediate access to the encoding seed and gives Eve the same final information as access to that seed only after a protected interval. Eve may then process her retained information without computational restriction. We state this delayed-access encryption assumption explicitly and construct MUB-QCT from a complete set of mutually unbiased bases in dimension $d$ and an affine pair-wise independent permutation family. For single-copy encoding, every seed-independent immediate measurement has trace-distance advantage at most $1/(2\sqrt{d+1})$ and mutual information at most $1/(d+1)$. Effective residual storage at diamond distance at most $\delta$ from replacement adds at most $\delta$ to the individual-attack distinguishing bound. Under i.i.d. individual attacks and entropy-preserving acceptance, we obtain an asymptotic key-rate bound and formulate final-key secrecy in composable trace distance. For $m$ independently randomized signals sharing one bit and seed, the optimal leakage under non-adaptive product measurements is $\min\{1,m/(d+1)\}$, allowing a linear-in-$d$ detection enhancement in that attack model. We also construct a seed-independent joint measurement that recovers the bit after disclosure with error at most $\varepsilon$ from $O(\log d+\log(1/\varepsilon))$ signals, retaining only classical information after measurement. This gives a quantitative separation between product and joint measurements. Bob uses two logical detection outcomes independently of $d$.

arXiv:2004.10173 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2004.10173v2 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2004.10173 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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