A common scenario in distributed computing involves a client who asks a server to perform a computation on a remote computer. An important problem is to determine the minimum amount of communication needed to specify the desired computation. Here we extend this problem to the quantum domain, analyzing the total amount of (classical and quantum) communication needed by a server in order to accurately execute a quantum process chosen by a client from a parametric family of quantum processes.

Due to Csiszár and Körner, the private capacity of classical wiretap channels has a single-letter characterization in terms of the private information. For quantum wiretap channels, however, it is known that regularization of the private information is necessary to reach the capacity. Here, we study hybrid classical-quantum wiretap channels in order to resolve to what extent quantum effects are needed to witness non-additivity phenomena in quantum Shannon theory.

We introduce a new setting for two-party cryptography by introducing the notion of temporarily trusted third parties. These third parties act honest-but-curious during the execution of the protocol. Once the protocol concludes and the trust period expires, these third parties may collaborate with an adversarial party. We implement a variant of the cryptographic primitive of bit commitment in this setting, which we call erasable bit commitment. In this primitive, the sender has the choice of either opening or erasing her commitment after the commit phase.

We propose a protocol based on pulse-position modulation and multi-level coding that allows one to bootstrap traditional quantum key distribution protocols while ensuring covertness, in the sense that no statistical test by the adversary can detect the presence of communication over the quantum channel better than a random guess. When run over a bosonic channel, our protocol can leverage existing discrete-modulated continuous-variable protocols.

We study quantum statistical inference tasks of hypothesis testing and their canonical variations, in order to review relations between their corresponding figures of merit-measures of statistical distance-and demonstrate the crucial differences which arise in the quantum regime in contrast to the classical setting.

Recently, Anshu et al. introduced “partially” smoothed information measures and used them to derive tighter bounds for several information-processing tasks, including quantum state merging and privacy amplification against quantum adversaries [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 66, 5022 (2020)]. Yet, a tight second-order asymptotic expansion of the partially smoothed conditional min-entropy in the i.i.d. setting remains an open question.

We introduce and analyse a multiple-access channel with two senders and one receiver, in the presence of i.i.d. noise coming from the environment. Partial side information about the environmental states allows the senders to modulate their signals accordingly. An adversarial jammer with its own access to information on environmental states and the modulation signals can jam a fraction of the transmissions.

It is known that quantum resources can allow us to achieve a family of equilibria that can have sometimes a better social welfare, while guaranteeing privacy. We use graph games to propose a way to build non-cooperative games from graph states, and we show how to achieve an unlimited improvement with quantum advice compared to classical advice.

Quantum information science is an exciting, wide, rapidly progressing, cross-disciplinary field, and that very nature makes it both attractive and hard to enter. In this primer, we first provide answers to the three essential questions that any newcomer needs to know: How is quantum information represented? How is quantum information processed? How is classical information extracted from quantum states?

We investigate the quantum-secure covert-communication capabilities of lossy thermal-noise bosonic channels, the quantum-mechanical model for many practical channels. We determine the expressions for the covert capacity of these channels: Lno-EA, when Alice and Bob share only a classical secret, and LEA, when they benefit from entanglement assistance. We find that entanglement assistance alters the fundamental scaling law for covert communication.