Using Quantum Oblivious Transfer to Cheat Sensitive Quantum Bit Commitment

It is well known that unconditionally secure bit commitment is impossible even in the quantum world. In this paper a weak variant of quantum bit commitment, introduced independently by Aharonov et al. [2] and Hardy and Kent [8] is investigated. In this variant, the parties require some nonzero probability of detecting a cheating, i.e. if Bob, who commits a bit b to Alice, changes his mind during the revealing phase then Alice detects the cheating with a positive probability (we call this property binding); and if Alice gains information about the committed bit before the revealing phase then Bob discovers this with positive probability (sealing). In our paper we give quantum bit commitment scheme that is simultaneously binding and sealing and we show that if a cheating gives ε advantage to a malicious Alice then Bob can detect the cheating with a probability Ω(ε). If Bob cheats then Alice's probability of detecting the cheating is greater than some xed constant λ > 0. This improves the probabilities of cheating detections shown by Hardy and Kent and the scheme by Aharonov et al. who presented a protocol that is either binding or sealing, but not simultaneously both. To construct a cheat sensitive quantum bit commitment scheme we use a protocol for a weak quantum one-out-of-two oblivious transfer ( ( 2 1 ) -OT). In this version, similarly as in the standard de nition, Alice has initially secret bits a0, a1 and Bob has a secret selection bit i and if both parties are honest they solve the ( 2 1 ) -OT problem ful lling the standard security requirements. However, if Alice is dishonest and she gains some information about the secret selection bit then the probability that Bob computes the correct value is proportionally small. Moreover, if Bob is dishonest and he learns something about both bits, then he is not able to gain full information about one of them.