On the question of secret probability distributions in quantum bit commitment

Abstract

The proof of the no-go theorem of unconditionally secure quantum bit commitment depends on the assumption that Alice knows every detail of the protocol, including the probability distributions associated with all the random variables generated by Bob. We argue that this condition may not be universally satisfied. In fact it can be shown that when Bob is allowed to use a secret probability distribution the joint quantum state is inevitably mixed. It is then natural to ask if Alice can still cheat. A positive answer has been given by us in [13] for the perfectly concealing case. In this paper, we present a simplified proof of our previous result, and extend it to cover the imperfectly concealing case as well.