All star-incompatible measurements can certify steering-based randomness

Abstract

Certifying that quantum randomness generated by untrusted devices is unpredictable to an attacker (say, Eve) is crucial for device-independent security. Bipartite protocols where only one of the parties is trusted are termed one-sided device-independent (1SDI) or steering-based protocols, where the untrusted party (say, Alice) performs measurements on her part of a bipartite entangled state to steer the subsystem of the trusted party (say, Bob) into different ensembles (collectively, an assemblage) of quantum states. Recent work has shown that an assemblage has certified randomness if and only if its realization requires a set of measurements that are star-incompatible, i.e., the measurement setting of interest for the guessing probability of Eve is incompatible with at least one of the remaining measurement settings of Alice. However, can one always extract randomness from star-incompatible measurements? And if so, how much randomness can one extract from them? Here we demonstrate that one can extract steering-based randomness from any set of star-incompatible measurements, thereby establishing an equivalence between star-incompatibility and steering-based randomness. We then provide a lower bound on the minimum guessing probability for a given set of measurements that is computable via semidefinite programming. This bound is tight when the Hilbert space dimension of Bob's system is at least that of Alice's. Finally, to provide a quantitative handle on star-incompatibility and the randomness extractable from it, we introduce a weight-based measure of star-incompatibility and lower bound the amount of star-incompatibility required to certify a given amount of randomness.

arXiv comment23 pages, 3 figures