Privacy Amplification Against Active Quantum Adversaries
This addresses security for quantum communication systems against active attacks, representing an incremental extension of classical methods to the quantum domain.
The paper tackles the problem of privacy amplification against active adversaries with quantum side information, showing that the Dodis-Wichs protocol remains secure when using a quantum-proof non-malleable extractor, and provides the first such protocol with performance comparable to classical near-optimal protocols.
Privacy amplification is the task by which two cooperating parties transform a shared weak secret, about which an eavesdropper may have side information, into a uniformly random string uncorrelated from the eavesdropper. Privacy amplification against passive adversaries, where it is assumed that the communication is over a public but authenticated channel, can be achieved in the presence of classical as well as quantum side information by a single-message protocol based on strong extractors. In 2009 Dodis and Wichs devised a two-message protocol to achieve privacy amplification against active adversaries, where the public communication channel is no longer assumed to be authenticated, through the use of a strengthening of strong extractors called non-malleable extractors which they introduced. Dodis and Wichs only analyzed the case of classical side information. We consider the task of privacy amplification against active adversaries with quantum side information. Our main result is showing that the Dodis-Wichs protocol remains secure in this scenario provided its main building block, the non-malleable extractor, satisfies a notion of quantum-proof non-malleability which we introduce. We show that an adaptation of a recent construction of non-malleable extractors due to Chattopadhyay et al. is quantum proof, thereby providing the first protocol for privacy amplification that is secure against active quantum adversaries. Our protocol is quantitatively comparable to the near-optimal protocols known in the classical setting.