Homomorphic Quantum Error Correction

Abstract:We study the algebraic compatibility between quantum homomorphic encryption and stabilizer quantum error correction in an honest-but-curious model, restricting the encryption to the transversal block-Pauli mask $(X^aZ^b)^{\otimes n}$ controlled by two secret key bits $a$ and $b$. We prove a necessary and sufficient criterion for an $[[n,1,d]]$ stabilizer code to remain compatible with this mask, namely that the transversal $X$ and $Z$ operators commute with every stabilizer generator, and we specialize it to a classical-code criterion for Calderbank--Shor--Steane codes. Combining code-space preservation with the logical action of the mask, every stabilizer code falls, with respect to each of the two transversal mask operators, into exactly one of three classes: incompatible, compatible but trivially acting, or compatible with a nontrivial logical Pauli action; the two operators need not fall into the same class. We verify this classification by exact symplectic computation for rotated and planar surface codes, toric codes, triangular and toric color codes, the $[[15,1,3]]$ code and several small codes, and find that the class is fixed by the lattice size and the boundary presentation rather than by the topological phase: the surface-code family realizes all three classes, whereas color codes realize only the two compatible ones. For encrypted computation we show that the Shor code does not implement the logical $T$ gate by a transversal $T^{\otimes 9}$, whereas suitable triorthogonal codes do so up to a Clifford correction. We formulate logical-Pauli masking as a code-independent algebraic template. Syndrome extraction and recovery are key-independent whenever the mask preserves the code space, so that the client only needs the block size and the class of the code to decrypt.

Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Information Theory (cs.IT)

arXiv:2605.25692 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2605.25692v2 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.25692 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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