Perfect cheating is impossible for single-qubit position verification

Published

June 28, 2024

Author(s)

Carl A. Miller, Yusuf Alnawakhtha

Abstract

In quantum position verification, a prover certifies her location by performing a quantum computation and returning the results (at the speed of light) to a set of trusted verifiers. One of the very first protocols for quantum position verification was proposed in (Kent, Munro, Spiller 2011): the prover receives a qubit Q from one direction, receives an orthogonal basis v, v⊥} from the opposite direction, then measures Q in v, v⊥} and broadcasts the result. A number of variants of this protocol have been proposed and analyzed, but the question of whether the original protocol itself is secure has never been fully resolved. In this work we show that there is no perfect finite-dimensional cheating strategy for the original KMS measurement protocol. Our approach makes use of tools from real algebraic geometry.

Citation

arXiv

Volume

2406

Pub Weblink

https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.20022

Pub Type

Websites

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2406.20022

Local Download

Keywords

PNT, quantum cryptography, authentication, algebraic geometry

Citation

Miller, C. and Alnawakhtha, Y. (2024), Perfect cheating is impossible for single-qubit position verification, arXiv, [online], https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2406.20022, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=958087, https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.20022 (Accessed October 13, 2025)