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Title: Quantum Lightning Never Strikes the Same State Twice
Public key quantum money can be seen as a version of the quantum no-cloning theorem that holds even when the quantum states can be verified by the adversary. In this work, we investigate quantum lightning where no-cloning holds even when the adversary herself gener- ates the quantum state to be cloned. We then study quantum money and quantum lightning, showing the following results: – We demonstrate the usefulness of quantum lightning beyond quan- tum money by showing several potential applications, such as gen- erating random strings with a proof of entropy, to completely decen- tralized cryptocurrency without a block-chain, where transactions is instant and local. – We give Either/Or results for quantum money/lightning, showing that either signatures/hash functions/commitment schemes meet very strong recently proposed notions of security, or they yield quan- tum money or lightning. Given the difficulty in constructing public key quantum money, this suggests that natural schemes do attain strong security guarantees. – We show that instantiating the quantum money scheme of Aaron- son and Christiano [STOC’12] with indistinguishability obfuscation that is secure against quantum computers yields a secure quantum money scheme. This construction can be seen as an instance of our Either/Or result for signatures, giving the first separation between two security notions for signatures from the literature. – Finally, we give a plausible construction for quantum lightning, which we prove secure under an assumption related to the multi- collision resistance of degree-2 hash functions. Our construction is inspired by our Either/Or result for hash functions, and yields the first plausible standard model instantiation of a non-collapsing col- lision resistant hash function. This improves on a result of Unruh [Eurocrypt’16] which is relative to a quantum oracle.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1749731
NSF-PAR ID:
10095296
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
EUROCRYPT 2019
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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