Blind Quantum Computing with Weak Coherent Pulses

Abstract

The universal blind quantum computation (UBQC) protocol [A. Broadbent, J. Fitzsimons, and E. Kashefi, in Proceedings of the 50th Annual IEEE Symposiumon Foundations of Computer Science (IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 2009), pp.517-526.] allows a client to perform quantum computation on a remote server. In an ideal setting, perfect privacy is guaranteed if the client is capable of producing specific, randomly chosen single qubit states. While from a theoretical point of view, this may constitute the lowest possible quantum requirement, from a pragmatic point of view, generation of such states to be sent along long distances can never be achieved perfectly. We introduce the concept of ϵ blindness for UBQC, in analogy to the concept of ϵ security developed for other cryptographic protocols, allowing us to characterize the robustness and security properties of the protocol under possible imperfections. We also present a remote blind single qubit preparation protocol with weak coherent pulses for the client to prepare, in a delegated fashion, quantum states arbitrarily close to perfect random single qubit states. This allows us to efficiently achieve ϵ-blind UBQC for any ϵ>0, even if the channel between the client and the server is arbitrarily lossy.