We study properties of quantum strategies, which are complete specifications of a given party's actions in any multiple-round interaction involving the exchange of quantum information with one or more other parties. In particular, we focus on a representation of quantum strategies that generalizes the Choi-Jamio{\l}kowski representation of quantum operations. This new representation associates with each strategy a positive semidefinite operator acting only on the tensor product of its input and output spaces. Various facts about such representations are established, and two applications are discussed: the first is a new and conceptually simple proof of Kitaev's lower bound for strong coin-flipping, and the second is a proof of the exact characterization QRG = EXP of the class of problems having quantum refereed games.Comment: 23 pages, 12pt font, single-column compilation of STOC 2007 final versio

Abstract.A one-time program is a hypothetical device by which a user may evaluate a circuit on exactly one input of his choice, before the device self-destructs. One-time programs cannot be achieved by software alone, as any software can be copied and re-run. However, it is known that every circuit can be compiled into a one-time program using a very basic hypothetical hardware device called a one-time memory. At first glance it may seem that quantum information, which cannot be copied, might also allow for one-time programs. But it is not hard to see that this intuition is false: one-time programs for classical or quantum circuits based solely on quantum information do not exist, even with computational assumptions.This observation raises the question, "what assumptions are required to achieve one-time programs for quantum circuits?" Our main result is that any quantum circuit can be compiled into a one-time program assuming only the same basic one-time memory devices used for classical circuits. Moreover, these quantum one-time programs achieve statistical universal composability (UC-security) against any malicious user. Our construction employs methods for computation on authenticated quantum data, and we present a new quantum authentication scheme called the trap scheme for this purpose. As a corollary, we establish UC-security of a recent protocol for delegated quantum computation.

The present paper studies an operator norm that captures the distinguishability of quantum strategies in the same sense that the trace norm captures the distinguishability of quantum states or the diamond norm captures the distinguishability of quantum channels. Characterizations of its unit ball and dual norm are established via strong duality of a semidefinite optimization problem. A full, formal proof of strong duality is presented for the semidefinite optimization problem in question. This norm and its properties are employed to generalize a state discrimination result of Ref. [GW05]. The generalized result states that for any two convex sets S,T of strategies there exists a fixed interactive measurement scheme that successfully distinguishes any choice of s in S from any choice of t in T with bias proportional to the minimal distance between the sets S and T as measured by this norm. A similar discrimination result for channels then follows as a special case.Comment: 25 pages: 17 main body, 6 appendix, 2 references. Final version, minor change

This paper studies quantum refereed games, which are quantum interactive proof systems with two competing provers: one that tries to convince the verifier to accept and the other that tries to convince the verifier to reject. We prove that every language having an ordinary quantum interactive proof system also has a quantum refereed game in which the verifier exchanges just one round of messages with each prover. A key part of our proof is the fact that there exists a single quantum measurement that reliably distinguishes between mixed states chosen arbitrarily from disjoint convex sets having large minimal trace distance from one another. We also show how to reduce the probability of error for some classes of quantum refereed games.Comment: 13 pages, to appear in STACS 200

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We introduce a definition of the fidelity function for multi-round quantum strategies, which we call the strategy fidelity, that is a generalization of the fidelity function for quantum states. We provide many properties of the strategy fidelity including a Fuchs-van de Graaf relationship with the strategy norm. We also provide a general monotonicity result for both the strategy fidelity and strategy norm under the actions of strategy-to-strategy linear maps. We illustrate an operational interpretation of the strategy fidelity in the spirit of Uhlmann's Theorem and discuss its application to the security analysis of quantum protocols for interactive cryptographic tasks such as bit-commitment and oblivious string transfer. Our analysis is general in the sense that the actions of the protocol need not be fully specified, which is in stark contrast to most other security proofs. Lastly, we provide a semidefinite programming formulation of the strategy fidelity.

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Oblivious transfer is a fundamental cryptographic primitive in which Bob transfers one of two bits to Alice in such a way that Bob cannot know which of the two bits Alice has learned. We present an optimal security bound for quantum oblivious transfer protocols, in the information theoretic setting, under a natural and arguably demanding definition of what it means for Alice to cheat. Our lower bound is a smooth tradeoff between the probability P Bob with which Bob can guess Alice's bit choice and the probability P Alice with which Alice can guess both of Bob's bits given that she learns one of the bits with certainty. We prove that 2P Bob + P Alice ≥ 2 in any quantum protocol for oblivious transfer, from which it follows that one of the two parties must be able to cheat with probability at least 2/3. We prove that this bound is optimal by exhibiting a family of protocols whose cheating probabilities can be made arbitrarily close to any point on the tradeoff curve.