### On the (Im)plausibility of Public-Key Quantum Money from Collision-Resistant Hash Functions

##### Abstract

Public-key quantum money is a cryptographic proposal for using highly entangled quantum states as currency that is publicly verifiable yet resistant to counterfeiting due to the laws of physics. Despite significant interest, constructing provably-secure public-key quantum money schemes based on standard cryptographic assumptions has remained an elusive goal. Even proposing plausibly-secure candidate schemes has been a challenge. These difficulties call for a deeper and systematic study of the structure of public-key quantum money schemes and the assumptions they can be based on. Motivated by this, we present the first black-box separation of quantum money and cryptographic primitives. Specifically, we show that collision-resistant hash functions cannot be used as a black-box to construct public-key quantum money schemes where the banknote verification makes classical queries to the hash function. Our result involves a novel combination of state synthesis techniques from quantum complexity theory and simulation techniques, including Zhandry's compressed oracle technique.

Available format(s)
Category
Foundations
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
quantum cryptographyquantum moneyblack-box separations
Contact author(s)
prabhanjan @ cs ucsb edu
huzh19 @ mails tsinghua edu cn
hyuen @ cs columbia edu
History
2023-01-23: approved
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2023/069

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/069,
author = {Prabhanjan Ananth and Zihan Hu and Henry Yuen},
title = {On the (Im)plausibility of Public-Key Quantum Money from Collision-Resistant Hash Functions},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2023/069},
year = {2023},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/069}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/069}
}

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