English

Quantum Lightning Never Strikes the Same State Twice

Cryptography and Security 2017-11-16 v3 Computational Complexity Quantum Physics

Abstract

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, investigate quantum lightning, a formalization of "collision-free quantum money" defined by Lutomirski et al. [ICS'10], where no-cloning holds even when the adversary herself generates 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 by showing several potential applications, such as generating random strings with a proof of entropy, to completely decentralized cryptocurrency without a block-chain, where transactions is instant and local. - We give win-win results for quantum money/lightning, showing that either signatures/hash functions/commitment schemes meet very strong recently proposed notions of security, or they yield quantum money or lightning. - We construct quantum lightning under the assumed multi-collision resistance of random degree-2 systems of polynomials. - We show that instantiating the quantum money scheme of Aaronson and Christiano [STOC'12] with indistinguishability obfuscation that is secure against quantum computers yields a secure quantum money scheme

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.02276,
  title  = {Quantum Lightning Never Strikes the Same State Twice},
  author = {Mark Zhandry},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.02276},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:38:13.067Z