Code-routing: a new attack on position verification

Quantum 7, 1079 (2023).

https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2023-08-09-1079

The cryptographic task of position verification attempts to verify one party’s location in spacetime by exploiting constraints on quantum information and relativistic causality. A popular verification scheme known as $f$-routing involves requiring the prover to redirect a quantum system based on the value of a Boolean function $f$. Cheating strategies for the $f$-routing scheme require the prover use pre-shared entanglement, and security of the scheme rests on assumptions about how much entanglement a prover can manipulate. Here, we give a new cheating strategy in which the quantum system is encoded into a secret-sharing scheme, and the authorization structure of the secret-sharing scheme is exploited to direct the system appropriately. This strategy completes the $f$-routing task using $O(SP_p(f))$ EPR pairs, where $SP_p(f)$ is the minimal size of a span program over the field $mathbb{Z}_p$ computing $f$. This shows we can efficiently attack $f$-routing schemes whenever $f$ is in the complexity class $text{Mod}_ptext{L}$, after allowing for local pre-processing. The best earlier construction achieved the class L, which is believed to be strictly inside of $text{Mod}_ptext{L}$. We also show that the size of a quantum secret sharing scheme with indicator function $f_I$ upper bounds entanglement cost of $f$-routing on the function $f_I$.