Paper 2024/1683

Unclonable Functional Encryption

Abstract

In a functional encryption (FE) scheme, a user that holds a ciphertext and a function-key can learn the result of applying the function to the plaintext message. Security requires that the user does not learn anything beyond the function evaluation. On the other hand, unclonable encryption (UE) is a uniquely quantum primitive, which ensures that an adversary cannot duplicate a ciphertext to decrypt the same message multiple times. In this work we introduce unclonable quantum functional encryption (UFE), which both extends the notion of FE to the quantum setting and also possesses the unclonable security of UE. We give a construction for UFE that supports arbitrary quantum messages and polynomialy-sized circuits, and achieves unclonable-indistinguishable security for dependently sampled function keys. In particular, our UFE guarantees that two parties cannot simultaneously recover the correct function outputs using two independently sampled function keys. Our construction combines quantum garbled circuits [BY22], and quantum-key unclonable encryption [AKY24], and leverages techniques from the plaintext expansion arguments in [Hir+23]. As an application we give the first construction for public-key UE with variable decryption keys. Lastly, we establish a connection between quantum indistinguishability obfuscation (qiO) and quantum functional encryption (QFE); Showing that any multi-input indistinguishability-secure quantum functional encryption scheme unconditionally implies the existence of qiO.