English

Limitations on Uncloneable Encryption and Simultaneous One-Way-to-Hiding

Quantum Physics 2021-11-05 v3 Cryptography and Security

Abstract

We study uncloneable quantum encryption schemes for classical messages as recently proposed by Broadbent and Lord. We focus on the information-theoretic setting and give several limitations on the structure and security of these schemes: Concretely, 1) We give an explicit cloning-indistinguishable attack that succeeds with probability 12+μ/16\frac12 + \mu/16 where μ\mu is related to the largest eigenvalue of the resulting quantum ciphertexts. 2) For a uniform message distribution, we partially characterize the scheme with the minimal success probability for cloning attacks. 3) Under natural symmetry conditions, we prove that the rank of the ciphertext density operators has to grow at least logarithmically in the number of messages to ensure uncloneable security. 4) The \emph{simultaneous} one-way-to-hiding (O2H) lemma is an important technique in recent works on uncloneable encryption and quantum copy protection. We give an explicit example which shatters the hope of reducing the multiplicative "security loss" constant in this lemma to below 9/8.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.14510,
  title  = {Limitations on Uncloneable Encryption and Simultaneous One-Way-to-Hiding},
  author = {Christian Majenz and Christian Schaffner and Mehrdad Tahmasbi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.14510},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

v2 and v3: several fixes, including a missing attribution to Broadbent and Lord

R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:35:25.536Z