Secure Identification in The Isolated Qubits Model

TL;DR

This paper develops secure oblivious transfer and identification protocols within the isolated qubits model, enabling complex cryptographic tasks while addressing the limitations of non-entangling quantum operations.

Contribution

It introduces new secure oblivious transfer protocols for strings and extends to interactive protocols for complex functionalities in the isolated qubits model.

Findings

Secure string oblivious transfer protocols are constructed.

Interactive protocols for two-party functionalities are developed.

Non-interactive secure identification is proven impossible.

Abstract

Oblivious transfer is a powerful cryptographic primitive that is complete for secure multi-party computation. In oblivious transfer protocols a user sends one or more messages to a receiver, while the sender remains oblivious as to which messages have been received. Protocols for oblivious transfer cannot exist in a classical or fully-quantum world, but can be implemented by restricting the users' power. The isolated qubits model is a cryptographic model in which users are restricted to single-qubit operations and are not allowed to use entangling operations. Furthermore, all parties are allowed to store qubits for a long time before measuring them. In this model, a secure single-bit one-out-of-two randomised oblivious transfer protocol was recently presented by Liu. Motivated by this result, we construct a protocol for secure string one-out-of-two randomised oblivious transfer by simplifying and generalising the existing proof. We then study for the first time interactive protocols for more complex two-party functionalities in this model based on the security of our construction. In order to guarantee the composability of our construction, users are restricted to measurement at the end of each sub-protocol. It is then possible to construct secure one-out-of-two and one-out-of-k oblivious transfer protocols in the isolated qubits model. Moreover, we study secure password-based identification, where a user identifies himself to another user by evaluating the equality function on their inputs, or passwords. We use the oblivious transfer constructions mentioned above as sub-protocols to construct a secure identification protocol. Finally, we prove that constructing a secure identification protocol non-interactively is impossible, even using oblivious transfer.