Device-independent security is the gold standard for quantum cryptography: not only is security based entirely on the laws of quantum mechanics, but it holds irrespective of any a priori assumptions on the quantum devices used in a protocol, making it particularly applicable in a quantum-wary environment. While the existence of device-independent protocols for tasks such as randomness expansion and quantum key distribution has recently been established, the underlying proofs of security remain very challenging, yield rather poor key rates, and demand very high quality quantum devices, thus making them all but impossible to implement in practice. We introduce a technique for the analysis of device-independent cryptographic protocols. We provide a flexible protocol and give a security proof that provides quantitative bounds that are asymptotically tight, even in the presence of general quantum adversaries. At a high level our approach amounts to establishing a reduction to the scenario in which the untrusted device operates in an identical and independent way in each round of the protocol. This is achieved by leveraging the sequential nature of the protocol and makes use of a newly developed tool, the “entropy accumulation theorem” of Dupuis, Fawzi, and Renner [ Entropy Accumulation, preprint, 2016]. As concrete applications we give simple and modular security proofs for device-independent quantum key distribution and randomness expansion protocols based on the CHSH inequality. For both tasks, we establish essentially optimal asymptotic key rates and noise tolerance. In view of recent experimental progress, which has culminated in loophole-free Bell tests, it is likely that these protocols can be practically implemented in the near future.

Device-independent quantum key distribution (DI-QKD) provides the gold standard for secure key exchange. Not only does it allow for information-theoretic security based on quantum mechanics, but it also relaxes the need to physically model the devices, thereby fundamentally ruling out many quantum hacking threats to which non-DI QKD systems are vulnerable. In practice though, DI-QKD is very challenging. It relies on the loophole-free violation of a Bell inequality, a task that requires high quality entanglement to be distributed between distant parties and close to perfect quantum measurements, which is hardly achievable with current technology. Notwithstanding, recent theoretical and experimental efforts have led to proof-of-principle DI-QKD implementations. In this article, we review the state-of-the-art of DI-QKD by highlighting its main theoretical and experimental achievements, discussing recent proof-of-principle demonstrations, and emphasizing the existing challenges in the field.

Secret and perfect randomness is an essential resource in cryptography. Yet, it is not even clear that such exists. It is well known that the tools of classical computer science do not allow us to create secret and perfect randomness from a single weak public source. Quantum physics, on the other hand, allows for such a process, even in the most paranoid cryptographic sense termed “device-independent quantum cryptography”. We propose and prove the security of a new device-independent protocol that takes any single public Santha-Vazirani source as input and creates a secret close to uniform string in the presence of a quantum adversary. Our work is the first to achieve randomness amplification with all the following properties: (1) amplification and “privatization” of a public Santha-Vazirani source with arbitrary bias (2) the use of a device with only two components (3) non-vanishing extraction rate and (4) maximal noise tolerance. In particular, this implies that our protocol is the first protocol that can possibly be implemented with reachable parameters. We achieve these by combining three new tools: a particular family of Bell inequalities, a proof technique to lower bound entropy in the device-independent setting, and a framework for quantum-proof multi-source extractors.

Entanglement sources that produce many entangled states act as a main component in applications exploiting quantum physics such as quantum communication and cryptography. Realistic sources are inherently noisy, cannot run for an infinitely long time, and do not necessarily behave in an independent and identically distributed manner. An important question then arises-how can one test, or certify, that a realistic source produces high amounts of entanglement? Crucially, a meaningful and operational solution should allow us to certify the entanglement which is available for further applications after performing the test itself (in contrast to assuming the availability of an additional source which can produce more entangled states, identical to those which were tested). To answer the above question and lower bound the amount of entanglement produced by an uncharacterised source, we present a protocol that can be run by interacting classically with uncharacterised (but not entangled to one another) measurement devices used to measure the states produced by the source. A successful run of the protocol implies that the remaining quantum state has high amounts of one-shot distillable entanglement. That is, one can distill many maximally entangled states out of the single remaining state. Importantly, our protocol can tolerate noise and, thus, certify entanglement produced by realistic sources. With the above properties, the protocol acts as the first 'operational deviceindependent entanglement certification protocol' and allows one to test and benchmark uncharacterised entanglement sources which may be otherwise incomparable.

The task of privacy amplification, in which Alice holds some partially secret information with respect to an adversary Eve and wishes to distill it until it is completely secret, is known to be solvable almost optimally in both the classical and quantum worlds. Unfortunately, when considering an adversary who is limited only by nonsignaling constraints such a statement cannot be made in general. We here consider systems which violate the chained Bell inequality and prove that under the natural assumptions of a time-ordered nonsignaling system, which allow past subsystems to signal future subsystems (using the device's memory for example), superpolynomial privacy amplification by any hashing is impossible. This is of great relevance when considering practical device-independent key-distribution protocols which assume a superquantum adversary.

In device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD), an adversary prepares a device consisting of two components, distributed to Alice and Bob, who use the device to generate a secure key. The security of existing DIQKD schemes holds under the assumption that the two components of the device cannot communicate with one another during the protocol execution. This is called the no-communication assumption in DIQKD. Here, we show how to replace this assumption, which can be hard to enforce in practice, by a standard computational assumption from post-quantum cryptography: we give a protocol that produces secure keys even when the components of an adversarial device can exchange arbitrary quantum communication, assuming the device is computationally bounded. Importantly, the computational assumption only needs to hold during the protocol execution—the keys generated at the end of the protocol are information-theoretically secure as in standard DIQKD protocols.