Strong equivalence of reversible circuits is coNP-complete

It is well-known that deciding equivalence of logic circuits is a coNP-complete problem. As a corollary, the problem of deciding weak equivalence of reversible circuits, i.e. allowing initialized ancilla bits in the input and ignoring “garbage” ancilla bits in the output, is also coNP-complete. The complexity of deciding strong equivalence, including the ancilla bits, is less obvious and may depend on gate set. Here we use Barrington’s theorem to show that deciding strong equivalence of reversible circuits built from the Fredkin gate is coNP-complete. This implies coNP-completeness of deciding strong equivalence for other commonly used universal reversible gate sets, including any gate set that includes the Toffoli or Fredkin gate.