Unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment is impossible

The claim of quantum cryptography has always been that it can provide protocols that are unconditionally secure, that is, for which the security does not depend on any restriction on the time, space, or technology available to the cheaters. We show that this claim does not hold for any quantum bit commitment protocol. Since many cryptographic tasks use bit commitment as a basic primitive, this result implies a severe setback for quantum cryptography. The model used encompasses all reasonable implementations of quantum bit commitment protocols in which the participants have not met before, including those that make use of the theory of special relativity.

• Publication year

  1996

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  1996-05-30

• Fields of study

  Physics, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.78.3414arXiv quant-ph/9605044
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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