Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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Description

Software providers for cloud computing and AI applications frequently use the token-based pricing model, which provides a limited volume of computation for a fixed price. More broadly, the ability to limit the number or size of a user's queries has applications in software protection, digital rights management, and electronic cash. However, existing solutions require the user to submit queries to a centralized server, resulting in high computing costs for the software provider. This limitation is unavoidable in the classical setting because any software provided to the user can be copied and evaluated many times. In this talk, I will present a quantum solution to this problem.

First, we construct quantum one-time programs, which can be evaluated only once by an untrusted user. We leverage the destructive nature of quantum measurements to securely destroy the program as soon as its output is measured.

Second, we explain how to craft a notion of security that is best-possible, implying all achievable notions of security. This simplifies the landscape of security definitions and allows us to provide a one-time guarantee for partially deterministic functions that would not satisfy earlier, naive definitions of security.