Succinct arguments for quantum verification using minimal cryptography
Succinct Arguments for QMA from Collapsing Hash Functions
Cryptography and Security
Summary
Some quantum computations are hard to check efficiently. The authors show how to create very short proofs that can convince someone a quantum computation was done correctly, using only basic cryptographic assumptions called collapsing hash functions. Their method improves earlier techniques by using simpler communication and better security guarantees. This approach also enables outsourcing quantum computations privately and verifying them succinctly.
What this means in practice
- •For quantum software developers: Design protocols that verify quantum computations with short arguments using minimal cryptographic assumptions.
- •For blockchain architects: Explore new proof systems for verifying quantum-resistant proofs that rely only on one-way functions.
A theory result. No direct application yet.
Authors
James Bartusek, Giulio Malavolta
Abstract
We prove the existence of succinct arguments for QMA, assuming only the existence of collapsing hash functions. This is the first scheme that relies only on unstructured ``Minicrypt'' assumptions, which are not known to imply public-key encryption. Our main technical contribution is a quantum-succinct \emph{claw-state generation} protocol that allows us to bootstrap a small number of quantum correlations into an arbitrarily large number of claw-state correlations, using classical communication only. This improves upon the work of [Zhang, STOC 2021], having better round complexity, a proof in the standard model, and being overall much simpler. This yields a quantum-succinct blind delegation of quantum computation protocol from one-way functions, which we plug into the communication-compression compiler of [Bartusek, Liu, and Malavolta, EUROCRYPT 2026] to obtain succinct arguments for QMA.