A Cheat-Sensitive Primitive for Destination-Private Quantum Routing
Abstract
Quantum networks will rely on intermediate nodes to distribute entanglement, but the same nodes may learn which users are being connected. We introduce a minimal two-call routing primitive in which a user, Alice, establishes an entangled link with one of several clients while testing whether the provider, Bob, has disturbed a coherently encoded request. The construction adapts the hidden-order mechanism of quantum private queries: one call contains a direct request, the other a coherent superposition of the desired and null addresses, and Alice keeps their order secret. A private matching qubit held by the selected client restores the coherent test state after a favorable Bell-measurement outcome, so that Alice can test the returned query without any further operation by Bob. The claim is deliberately limited. The protocol shows that a routing request can carry a physical cheating test, and it detects an explicit destination-reading attack with nonzero probability. It does not yet provide a quantitative information-disturbance tradeoff, composable security, or certification of an unmeasured output against arbitrary attacks. We also characterize the exact perfect-pass limit, in which Bob's residual state, averaged over the private matching states, is independent of the destination.
Related
- Encrypted cloning of qubits is able to serve as a quantum primitive, already on non-error-corrected quantum hardware
- Private communication via zero-private-capacity quantum channels
- Primitive Quantum Gates for an SU(3) Discrete Subgroup: Σ(216×3)
- Tight Communication Bounds for Distributed Algorithms in the Quantum Routing Model
- The exact strong converse exponent for private communication over quantum channels
BibTeX
@misc{oliviero2026cheatsensitive,
title = {{A Cheat-Sensitive Primitive for Destination-Private Quantum Routing}},
author = {S. F. E. Oliviero and S. Onofri and V. Giovannetti},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.04359},
eprint = {2610.04359},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04359},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A Cheat-Sensitive Primitive for Destination-Private Quantum Routing
AU - S. F. E. Oliviero
AU - S. Onofri
AU - V. Giovannetti
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/03
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.04359
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04359
AB - Quantum networks will rely on intermediate nodes to distribute entanglement, but the same nodes may learn which users are being connected. We introduce a minimal two-call routing primitive in which a user, Alice, establishes an entangled link with one of several clients while testing whether the provider, Bob, has disturbed a coherently encoded request. The construction adapts the hidden-order mechanism of quantum private queries: one call contains a direct request, the other a coherent superposition of the desired and null addresses, and Alice keeps their order secret. A private matching qubit held by the selected client restores the coherent test state after a favorable Bell-measurement outcome, so that Alice can test the returned query without any further operation by Bob. The claim is deliberately limited. The protocol shows that a routing request can carry a physical cheating test, and it detects an explicit destination-reading attack with nonzero probability. It does not yet provide a quantitative information-disturbance tradeoff, composable security, or certification of an unmeasured output against arbitrary attacks. We also characterize the exact perfect-pass limit, in which Bob's residual state, averaged over the private matching states, is independent of the destination.
ER -