Multi-Copy Security in Quantum Cryptography and More

Abstract:Unclonable cryptography uses the quantum no-cloning principle to achieve security guarantees that are impossible in a classical world. Most existing works, however, consider only single-key security. The few works that achieve collusion-resistance rely on techniques highly tailored to their applications. Moreover, multi-copy security, where an adversary receives identical copies of a pure state, remains largely open. In this work, we develop a toolset of generic compilers and technical lemmata for collusion-resistance and multi-copy security. We first show how classical functional encryption can upgrade single-key quantum protection of decryption keys to collusion-resistant security, covering copy-protection, secure leasing, and leakage resilience. We then give a purification compiler that upgrades collusion-resistant state-query games with classically determined outputs to multi-copy security, assuming only one-way functions. Along the way, we develop a collusion-resistant one-way-to-hiding lemma, a quantum-state analogue of the small-range-distributions lemma, and a quantum pigeonhole lemma for entangled adversaries. We also construct the first deterministic signatures with quantum-query security and show that strong search security implies identical-challenge security for collusion-resistant single-decryptor encryption. Using these tools, we obtain the first public-key quantum coins, multi-copy secure single-decryptor encryption and unclonable encryption, and collusion-resistant secure key leasing with a fully classical vendor. Our quantum coins and plain-model search-secure UE use indistinguishability obfuscation and one-way functions, while our QROM UE achieves indistinguishability security unconditionally. Finally, we obtain multi-copy secure LOCC leakage-resilient public-key encryption, making progress towards quantum key-fire in the plain model.

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

arXiv:2510.12626 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2510.12626v2 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.12626 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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