Obfuscation of Pseudo-Deterministic Quantum Circuits

Abstract

We show how to obfuscate pseudo-deterministic quantum circuits, assuming the quantum hardness of learning with errors (QLWE) and post-quantum virtual black-box (VBB) obfuscation for classical circuits. Given the classical description of a quantum circuit Q, our obfuscator outputs a quantum state | Q that can be used to evaluate Q repeatedly on arbitrary inputs.Instantiating the VBB obfuscator for classical circuits with any candidate post-quantum indistinguishability obfuscator gives us the first candidate construction of indistinguishability obfuscation for all polynomial-size pseudo-deterministic quantum circuits. In particular, our scheme is the first candidate obfuscator for a class of circuits that is powerful enough to implement Shor's algorithm (SICOMP 1997).Our approach follows Bartusek and Malavolta (ITCS 2022), who obfuscate null quantum circuits by obfuscating the verifier of an appropriate classical verification of quantum computation (CVQC) scheme. We go beyond null circuits by constructing a publicly-verifiable CVQC scheme for quantum partitioning circuits, which can be used to verify the evaluation procedure of Mahadev's quantum fully-homomorphic encryption scheme (FOCS 2018). We achieve this by upgrading the one-time secure scheme of Bartusek (TCC 2021) to a fully reusable scheme, via a publicly-decodable Pauli functional commitment, which we formally define and construct in this work. This commitment scheme, which satisfies a notion of binding against committers that can access the receiver's standard and Hadamard basis decoding functionalities, is constructed by building on techniques of Amos, Georgiou, Kiayias, and Zhandry (STOC 2020) introduced in the context of equivocal but collision-resistant hash functions. * Part of this work was done while visiting NTT Social Informatics Laboratories for an internship.

Quantum Obfuscation of Generalized Quantum Power Functions with Coefficient

“…Similarly, Alagic et al demonstrated the impossibility of universal virtual black-box obfuscation in quantum settings, but quantum obfuscation can still be achieved by particular obfuscation methods for specific functions or circuits. In 2023, Bartusek et al [24] implemented a quantum obfuscation scheme for polynomial-sized pseudo-deterministic quantum circuits. In particular, this scheme can obfuscate the circuit implementing Shor's algorithm.…”