Paper 2025/891

Obfuscation of Unitary Quantum Programs

Mi-Ying (Miryam) Huang, University of Southern California
Er-Cheng Tang, University of Washington
Abstract

Program obfuscation aims to hide the inner workings of a program while preserving its functionality. In the quantum setting, recent works have obtained obfuscation schemes for specialized classes of quantum circuits. For instance, Bartusek, Brakerski, and Vaikuntanathan (STOC 2024) constructed a quantum state obfuscation scheme, which supports the obfuscation of quantum programs represented as quantum states for pseudo-deterministic quantum programs with classical inputs and outputs in the classical oracle model. In this work, we improve upon existing results by constructing the first quantum state obfuscation scheme for unitary (or approximately unitary) quantum programs supporting quantum inputs and outputs in the classical oracle model. At the core of our obfuscation scheme are two novel ingredients: a functional quantum authentication scheme that allows key holders to learn specific functions of the authenticated quantum state with simulation-based security, and a compiler that represents an arbitrary quantum circuit as a projective linear-plus-measurement quantum program described by a sequence of non-adaptive Clifford gates interleaved with adaptive and compatible measurements.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
QuantumObfuscation
Contact author(s)
miying huang @ usc edu
erchtang @ uw edu
History
2025-07-16: revised
2025-05-19: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2025/891
License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC BY-NC-SA

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/891,
      author = {Mi-Ying (Miryam) Huang and Er-Cheng Tang},
      title = {Obfuscation of Unitary Quantum Programs},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/891},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/891}
}
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