Experimental quantum data locking
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Abstract
Classical correlation can be locked via quantum means: quantum data locking. With a short secret key, one can lock an exponentially large amount of information in order to make it inaccessible to unauthorized users without the key. Quantum data locking presents a resource-efficient alternative to one-time pad encryption which requires a key no shorter than the message. We report experimental demonstrations of a quantum data locking scheme originally proposed by D. P. DiVincenzo et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 067902 (2004)] and a loss-tolerant scheme developed by O. Fawzi et al. [J. ACM 60, 44 (2013)]. We observe that the unlocked amount of information is larger than the key size in both experiments, exhibiting strong violation of the incremental proportionality property of classical information theory. As an application example, we show the successful transmission of a photo over a lossy channel with quantum data (un)locking and error correction.