Simple and tight device-independent security proofs

Proving security of device-independent (DI) cryptographic protocols has been regarded to be a complex and tedious task. In this work we show that a newly developed tool, the “entropy accumulation theorem” of Dupuis et al. [DFR16], can be effectively applied to give fully general proofs of DI security. At a high level our technique 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 makes the proof much simpler and yields significantly better, essentially tight, quantitative results when considering general quantum adversaries, compared to what was known before. As concrete applications we give simple and modular security proofs for DI quantum key distribution and randomness expansion protocols based on the CHSH inequality. For both tasks we establish essentially optimal key rates and noise tolerance. As loophole-free Bell tests are finally being realised, our results considerably decrease the gap between theory and experiments, thereby marking an important step towards practical DI protocols and their implementations.