Physical Review Research (Aug 2024)

Impossibility of adversarial self-testing and secure sampling

  • Akshay Bansal,
  • Atul Singh Arora,
  • Thomas Van Himbeeck,
  • Jamie Sikora

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.L032039
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6, no. 3
p. L032039

Abstract

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Self-testing is the task where spatially separated Alice and Bob cooperate to deduce the inner workings of untrusted quantum devices by interacting with them in a classical manner. We examine the task above where Alice and Bob do not trust each other which we call adversarial self-testing. We show that adversarial self-testing implies secure sampling—a simpler task that we introduce where distrustful Alice and Bob wish to sample from a joint probability distribution with the guarantee that an honest party's marginal is not biased. By extending impossibility results in two-party quantum cryptography, we give a simple proof that both of these tasks are impossible in all but trivial settings.