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New Approaches for Quantum Copy-Protection

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Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2021 (CRYPTO 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12825))

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Abstract

Quantum copy-protection uses the unclonability of quantum states to construct quantum software that provably cannot be pirated. copy-protection would be immensely useful, but unfortunately, little is known about achieving it in general. In this work, we make progress on this goal, by giving the following results:

  • We show how to copy-protect any program that cannot be learned from its input-output behavior relative to a classical oracle. This construction improves on Aaronson (CCC 2009), which achieves the same relative to a quantum oracle. By instantiating the oracle with post-quantum candidate obfuscation schemes, we obtain a heuristic construction of copy-protection.

  • We show, roughly, that any program which can be watermarked can be copy detected, a weaker version of copy-protection that does not prevent copying, but guarantees that any copying can be detected. Our scheme relies on the security of the assumed watermarking, plus the assumed existence of public-key quantum money. Our construction is publicly detectable and applicable to many recent watermarking schemes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    That is, an oracle that implements a quantum operation.

  2. 2.

    Since \(M_0+M_1\) is the identity, \(M_1\) shares the same eigenvectors, with eigenvalue \(1-p\).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Paul Christiano for suggesting the idea of quantum copy-protection based on [AC12] hidden subspace oracles.

J. L., Q. L., M. Z. and R. Z.’s research is supported by NSF Grant; S. A. is supported by Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the US Department of Defense, the Simons Foundation’s It from Qubit Collaboration, and a Simons Investigator Award.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA

    Scott Aaronson, Jiahui Liu & Ruizhe Zhang

  2. Princeton University, Princeton, USA

    Qipeng Liu

  3. Princeton University and NTT Research, Princeton, USA

    Mark Zhandry

Authors
  1. Scott Aaronson
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  2. Jiahui Liu
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  3. Qipeng Liu
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  4. Mark Zhandry
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  5. Ruizhe Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Scott Aaronson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Columbia University, New York City, NY, USA

    Tal Malkin

  2. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Chris Peikert

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Aaronson, S., Liu, J., Liu, Q., Zhandry, M., Zhang, R. (2021). New Approaches for Quantum Copy-Protection. In: Malkin, T., Peikert, C. (eds) Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2021. CRYPTO 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12825. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84242-0_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84242-0_19

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