# Quantum Lock: A Provable Quantum Communication Advantage

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09469 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09469/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Unclonability and Quantum Cryptanalysis: From Foundations to Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17545/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Physical unclonable functions(PUFs) provide a unique fingerprint to a physical entity by exploiting the inherent physical randomness. Gao et al. discussed the vulnerability of most current-day PUFs to sophisticated machine learning-based attacks. We address this problem by integrating classical PUFs and existing quantum communication technology. Specifically, this paper proposes a generic design of provably secure PUFs, called hybrid locked PUFs(HLPUFs), providing a practical solution for securing classical PUFs. An HLPUF uses a classical PUF(CPUF), and encodes the output into non-orthogonal quantum states to hide the outcomes of the underlying CPUF from any adversary. Here we introduce a quantum lock to protect the HLPUFs from any general adversaries. The indistinguishability property of the non-orthogonal quantum states, together with the quantum lockdown technique prevents the adversary from accessing the outcome of the CPUFs. Moreover, we show that by exploiting non-classical properties of quantum states, the HLPUF allows the server to reuse the challenge-response pairs for further client authentication. This result provides an efficient solution for running PUF-based client authentication for an extended period while maintaining a small-sized challenge-response pairs database on the server side. Later, we support our theoretical contributions by instantiating the HLPUFs design using accessible real-world CPUFs. We use the optimal classical machine-learning attacks to forge both the CPUFs and HLPUFs, and we certify the security gap in our numerical simulation for construction which is ready for implementation.