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Published June 16, 2021 | public
Book Section - Chapter

Classical Proofs of Quantum Knowledge

Abstract

We define the notion of a proof of knowledge in the setting where the verifier is classical, but the prover is quantum, and where the witness that the prover holds is in general a quantum state. We establish simple properties of our definition, including that, if a nondestructive classical proof of quantum knowledge exists for some state, then that state can be cloned by an unbounded adversary, and that, under certain conditions on the parameters in our definition, a proof of knowledge protocol for a hard-to-clone state can be used as a (destructive) quantum money verification protocol. In addition, we provide two examples of protocols (both inspired by private-key classical verification protocols for quantum money schemes) which we can show to be proofs of quantum knowledge under our definition. In so doing, we introduce techniques for the analysis of such protocols which build on results from the literature on nonlocal games. Finally, we show that, under our definition, the verification protocol introduced by Mahadev (FOCS 2018) is a classical argument of quantum knowledge for QMA relations. In all cases, we construct an explicit quantum extractor that is able to produce a quantum witness given black-box quantum (rewinding) access to the prover, the latter of which includes the ability to coherently execute the prover's black-box circuit controlled on a superposition of messages from the verifier.

Additional Information

We thank Alexandru Gheorghiu for useful feedback and Or Sattath for comments. Thomas Vidick is supported by NSF CAREER Grant CCF-1553477, AFOSR YIP award number FA9550-16-1-0495, MURI Grant FA9550-18-1-0161 and the IQIM, an NSF Physics Frontiers Center (NSF Grant PHY-1125565) with support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF-12500028). This material is based upon work supported by DARPA under Agreement No. HR00112020023. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Government or DARPA.

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
January 15, 2024