quantum cryptography engineers

Abstract: While quantum interactive proof systems using at least three messages can achieve perfect completeness, as shown by Kitaev and Watrous (STOC 2000), whether perfect completeness is achievable for one- and two-message quantum proof systems has remained open. For the one-message case, whether $\sf QMA$ can achieve perfect completeness was posed as an open problem in Watrous (FOCS 2000) and Aharonov and Naveh (2002); for the two-message case, the corresponding problems were (implicitly) posed in Jain, Upadhyay, and Watrous~(FOCS 2009) and Kobayashi, Le Gall, and Nishimura (SICOMP, 2019). In this work, we establish that ${\sf QIP}(2)$, ${\rm qq}\text{-}{\sf QAM}$, $\sf QAM$, and $\sf QMA$ can achieve perfect completeness. Here ${\rm qq}\text{-}{\sf QAM}$ denotes the class of promise problems admitting two-message quantum-public-coin quantum interactive proof systems in which the verifier's only message consists of half-EPR pairs. Our main technical contributions are the follows: 1. For $\sf QMA$ (and directly for $\sf QAM$), an exactly constructible block-encoded matrix whose kernel certifies yes instances, constructed from the acceptance operator induced by the verification circuit. 2. For ${\sf QIP}(2)$ (and implicitly ${\rm qq}\text{-}{\sf QAM}$), a new turn-halving transformation that preserves completeness and ensures that the resulting proof system retains at least two messages, provided that the terminal state before the final measurement is efficiently preparable.

Abstract: Quantum computation gives rise to new pseudorandom primitives for states and unitaries, including pseudorandom state generators (PRSGs), pseudorandom function-like state generators (PRFSGs), and pseudorandom unitaries (PRUs). In this paper, we show a full unitary oracle separation between PRFSGs and PRUs. The separation holds between the strongest state notion and the weakest unitary notion: even adaptively secure, quantum-accessible PRFSGs do not imply non-adaptively secure, forward-only PRUs, even when their implementations are allowed to be non-unitary and use an arbitrary number of ancillary qubits. This reveals a fundamental distinction between pseudorandomness for quantum states and for quantum unitaries. Our main technical idea is to view a candidate PRU construction with access to state generation oracles as a map from the underlying oracle states to implemented unitaries, and to study the derivatives of this map. These derivatives are inherently low rank, and we exploit this low-rank structure to distinguish the resulting unitaries from truly random ones. We believe this differential perspective may be useful for studying other structural questions about quantum states and unitaries.