For more than a decade, it was believed that unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment (QBC) is impossible. But based on a previously proposed quantum key distribution scheme using orthogonal states, here we build a QBC protocol in which the density matrices of the quantum states encoding the commitment do not satisfy a crucial condition on which the no-go proofs of QBC are based. Thus, the no-go proofs could be evaded. Our protocol is fault-tolerant and very feasible with currently available technology. It reopens the venue for other ‘post-cold-war’ multi-party cryptographic protocols, e.g. quantum bit string commitment and quantum strong coin tossing with an arbitrarily small bias. This result also has a strong influence on the Clifton–Bub–Halvorson theorem which suggests that quantum theory could be characterized in terms of information-theoretic constraints.

Based on quantum entanglement, an all-or-nothing oblivious transfer protocol is proposed and is proven to be secure. The distinct merit of the present protocol lies in that it is not based on quantum bit commitment. More intriguingly, this OT protocol does not belong to a class of protocols denied by the Lo's no-go theorem of one-sided two-party secure computation, and thus its security can be achieved.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur

Though all-or-nothing oblivious transfer and one-out-of-two oblivious transfer are equivalent in classical cryptography, we here show that a protocol built upon secure quantum all-or-nothing oblivious transfer cannot satisfy the rigorous definition of quantum one-out-of-two oblivious transfer due to the nature of quantum cryptography. Thus the securities of the two oblivious transfer protocols are not equivalent at the quantum level.

To evade the well-known impossibility of unconditionally secure quantum two-party computations, previous quantum private comparison protocols have to adopt a third party. Here we study how far we can go with two parties only. We propose a very feasible and efficient protocol. Intriguingly, although the average amount of information leaked cannot be made arbitrarily small, we find that it never exceeds 14 bits for any length of the bit-string being compared.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

We simplified our previously proposed quantum bit commitment (QBC) protocol based on the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, by replacing symmetric beam splitters with asymmetric ones. It eliminates the need for random sending time of the photons; thus, the feasibility and efficiency are both improved. The protocol is immune to the cheating strategy in the Mayers-Lo-Chau no-go theorem of unconditionally secure QBC, because the density matrices of the committed states do not satisfy a crucial condition on which the no-go theorem holds.Comment: Published versio