On the Connection Between Quantum Pseudorandomness and Quantum Hardware Assumptions

TL;DR

This paper explores the fundamental links between quantum pseudorandomness and hardware assumptions like qPUFs, showing how they can be constructed from each other and improving related cryptographic protocols.

Contribution

It introduces new constructions connecting quantum pseudorandom states, unitaries, and hardware assumptions, and provides a sufficient condition for unitaries to form a secure qPUF challenge set.

Findings

Efficient pseudorandom quantum states can construct challenge sets for unforgeable qPUFs.

qPUFs and quantum pseudorandom unitaries can be mutually constructed from each other.

An improved client-server identification protocol using qPUFs without compromising security.

Abstract

This paper, for the first time, addresses the questions related to the connections between the quantum pseudorandomness and quantum hardware assumptions, specifically quantum physical unclonable functions (qPUFs). Our results show that the efficient pseudorandom quantum states (PRS) are sufficient to construct the challenge set for the universally unforgeable qPUF, improving the previous existing constructions that are based on the Haar-random states. We also show that both the qPUFs and the quantum pseudorandom unitaries (PRUs) can be constructed from each other, providing new ways to obtain PRS from the hardware assumptions. Moreover, we provide a sufficient condition (in terms of the diamond norm) that a set of unitaries should have to be a PRU in order to construct a universally unforgeable qPUF, giving yet another novel insight into the properties of the PRUs. Later, as an application of our results, we show that the efficiency of an existing qPUF-based client-server identification protocol can be improved without losing the security requirements of the protocol.