Experimental quantum tossing of a single coin

Abstract

The cryptographic protocol of coin tossing consists of two parties, Alice and Bob, that do not trust each other, but want to generate a random bit. If the parties use a classical communication channel and have unlimited computational resources, one of them can always cheat perfectly. Here we analyze in detail how the performance of a quantum coin tossing experiment should be compared to classical protocols, taking into account the inevitable experimental imperfections. We then report an all-optical fiber experiment in which a single coin is tossed whose randomness is higher than achievable by any classical protocol and present some easily realisable cheating strategies by Alice and Bob.

13 pages

References in corpus (3)

• Quantum weak coin flipping with arbitrarily small bias
• Security of quantum bit string commitment depends on the information measure
• Unconditionally Secure Quantum Bit Commitment