New Quantum Internet Applications via Verifiable One-Time Programs
This work addresses the challenge of practical quantum-assisted cryptography for secure applications, offering a near-term implementable framework, though it is incremental as it builds on existing cryptographic primitives.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling secure multi-party computations with minimal quantum resources by introducing Verifiable One-Time Programs (Ver-OTPs), which are used to construct single-round Open Secure Computation (OSC) for applications like sealed-bid auctions and differentially private aggregation, achieving this with only single-qubit states and classical cryptography.
We introduce Verifiable One-Time Programs (Ver-OTPs) and use them to construct single-round Open Secure Computation (OSC), a novel primitive enabling applications like (1) single-round sealed-bid auctions, (2) single-round and honest-majority atomic proposes -- a building block of consensus protocols, and (3) single-round differentially private statistical aggregation without pre-registration. First, we construct Ver-OTPs from single-qubit states and classical cryptographic primitives. Then, assuming a multi-key homomorphic scheme (MHE) with certain properties, we use Ver-OTPs with MHE to construct OSC. The underlying quantum requirement is minimal: only single-qubit states are needed alongside a hardware assumption on the receiver's quantum resources. Our work therefore provides a new framework for quantum-assisted cryptography that may be implementable with near-term quantum technology.