2020/05/13 by Gorjan Alagic, Zvika Brakerski, Alagic, Gorjan +5 · 3 citations
Computer Science · #Cryptography and Data Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security #Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2005.06432
openalex publication_date 2020/05/13 · openalex created_date 2022/07/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Virtual black-box obfuscation is a strong cryptographic primitive: it\nencrypts a circuit while maintaining its full input/output functionality. A\nremarkable result by Barak et al. (Crypto 2001) shows that a general obfuscator\nthat obfuscates classical circuits into classical circuits cannot exist. A\npromising direction that circumvents this impossibility result is to obfuscate\nclassical circuits into quantum states, which would potentially be better\ncapable of hiding information about the obfuscated circuit. We show that, under\nthe assumption that learning-with-errors (LWE) is hard for quantum computers,\nthis quantum variant of virtual black-box obfuscation of classical circuits is\ngenerally impossible. On the way, we show that under the presence of dependent\nclassical auxiliary input, even the small class of classical point functions\ncannot be quantum virtual black-box obfuscated.\n