Linear gate bounds against natural functions for position-verification

Vahid Asadi1, Richard Cleve1, Eric Culf1, and Alex May1,2

1Institute for Quantum Computing, Waterloo, Ontario
2Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario

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Updated version: The authors have uploaded version v5 of this work to the arXiv which may contain updates or corrections not contained in the published version v3. The authors left the following comment on the arXiv:
v5 is a polish of v4, correcting typos and some numerical values. v3 contained an error which v4/5 correct

Abstract

A quantum position-verification scheme attempts to verify the spatial location of a prover. The prover is issued a challenge with quantum and classical inputs and must respond with appropriate timings. We consider two well-studied position-verification schemes known as $f$-routing and $f$-BB84. Both schemes require an honest prover to locally compute a classical function $f$ of inputs of length $n$, and manipulate $O(1)$ size quantum systems. We prove the number of quantum gates plus single qubit measurements needed to implement a function $f$ is lower bounded linearly by the communication complexity of $f$ in the simultaneous message passing model with shared entanglement. Taking $f(x,y)=\sum_i x_i y_i$ to be the inner product function, we obtain a $\Omega(n)$ lower bound on quantum gates plus single qubit measurements. The scheme is feasible for a prover with linear classical resources and $O(1)$ quantum resources, and secure against sub-linear quantum resources.

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Cited by

[1] Yunkai Wang, Graeme Smith, and Alex May, "Secure Quantum Ranging", Physical Review Letters 135 26, 260802 (2025).

[2] Rene Allerstorfer, Andreas Bluhm, Harry Buhrman, Matthias Christandl, Llorenç Escolà-Farràs, Florian Speelman, and Philip Verduyn Lunel, "Making Existing Quantum Position Verification Protocols Secure Against Arbitrary Transmission Loss", Physical Review Letters 135 26, 260801 (2025).

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[4] Kirsten Kanneworff, Mio Poortvliet, Dirk Bouwmeester, Rene Allerstorfer, Philip Verduyn Lunel, Florian Speelman, Harry Buhrman, Petr Steindl, and Wolfgang Löffler, "Towards experimental demonstration of quantum position verification using single photons", Quantum Science and Technology 10 4, 045004 (2025).

[5] Vahid R. Asadi, Eric Culf, and Alex May, "Rank lower bounds on non-local quantum computation", arXiv:2402.18647, (2024).

[6] Llorenç Escolà-Farràs and Florian Speelman, "Quantum position verification in one shot: parallel repetition of the $f$-BB84 and $f$-routing protocols", arXiv:2503.09544, (2025).

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