Exponential Advantage of Multipartite Entanglement over Quantum Communication with Applications to Bounded-Storage Cryptography

We establish an exponential communication advantage enabled by multipartite quantum entanglement. Building on the bipartite Hidden Matching problem, we introduce a communication task involving multiple spatially separated senders and a single receiver. We show that a shared Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state enables completion of this task using only logarithmically many bits of classical communication from each sender. In contrast, without preshared entanglement, any protocol achieving high success probability requires polynomial communication from at least one sender, even when \emph{quantum} communication is allowed. Thus, classical communication assisted by multipartite entanglement can be exponentially more powerful than quantum communication without preshared entanglement. As a cryptographic application, we construct a seeded two-source randomness extractor and establish an exponential separation between entangled and unentangled quantum side-information. Specifically, compromising the extractor with two unentangled quantum states storing information about the two sources, respectively, requires polynomial-size memory, whereas exponentially smaller quantum memory suffices in the presence of a small amount of shared entanglement.