Secure Key from Bound Entanglement

Karol Horodecki, Michał Horodecki, Paweł Horodecki, Jonathan Oppenheim

Physical Review Letters · 2005 · 354 citations · 19 references

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TL;DR

The authors aim to characterize shared quantum states that contain a cryptographically private key. They develop a technique to identify states exhibiting irreversibility in entanglement distillation. They demonstrate that arbitrarily secure key can be distilled from bound entangled states, that some states have less distillable key than their entanglement cost, and that the distillable key is bounded by the relative entropy of entanglement, thereby linking privacy theory to entanglement manipulation.

Abstract

We characterize the set of shared quantum states which contain a cryptographically private key. This allows us to recast the theory of privacy as a paradigm closely related to that used in entanglement manipulation. It is shown that one can distill an arbitrarily secure key from bound entangled states. There are also states that have less distillable private keys than the entanglement cost of the state. In general, the amount of distillable key is bounded from above by the relative entropy of entanglement. Relationships between distillability and distinguishability are found for a class of states which have Bell states correlated to separable hiding states. We also describe a technique for finding states exhibiting irreversibility in entanglement distillation.

References

19