English

Quantum Weak Coin Flipping

Quantum Physics 2019-11-27 v2 Cryptography and Security

Abstract

We investigate weak coin flipping, a fundamental cryptographic primitive where two distrustful parties need to remotely establish a shared random bit. A cheating player can try to bias the output bit towards a preferred value. For weak coin flipping the players have known opposite preferred values. A weak coin-flipping protocol has a bias ϵ\epsilon if neither player can force the outcome towards their preferred value with probability more than 12+ϵ\frac{1}{2}+\epsilon. While it is known that all classical protocols have ϵ=12\epsilon=\frac{1}{2}, Mochon showed in 2007 [arXiv:0711.4114] that quantumly weak coin flipping can be achieved with arbitrarily small bias (near perfect) but the best known explicit protocol has bias 1/61/6 (also due to Mochon, 2005 [Phys. Rev. A 72, 022341]). We propose a framework to construct new explicit protocols achieving biases below 1/61/6. In particular, we construct explicit unitaries for protocols with bias approaching 1/101/10. To go below, we introduce what we call the Elliptic Monotone Align (EMA) algorithm which, together with the framework, allows us to numerically construct protocols with arbitrarily small biases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.02984,
  title  = {Quantum Weak Coin Flipping},
  author = {Atul Singh Arora and Jérémie Roland and Stephan Weis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.02984},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

98 pages split into 3 parts, 10 figures; For updates and contact information see https://atulsingharora.github.io/WCF. Version 2 has minor improvements. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.7166 by other authors

R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:07:54.810Z