PUFSeQure: Physical uncloneable functions for quantum secure multi-party computation

Project funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT) (Concurso de Projetos Exploratórios em Todos os Domínios Científicos 2023), grant 2023.14154.PEX. Funded amount: EUR 49,986.90, as stated by the source. Runs 2025-02-01 to 2027-01-31. Keywords: quantum cryptography, universally composable security, hardware assumptions, Exact sciences. Source: OpenAIRE Graph, from the funder's project data (collected by OpenAIRE on 2025-07-20); national funding data, not CORDIS. Abstract given by the source: Secure multi-party computation (SMPC) is a key research area of both classical and quantum cryptography, as it permits distrustful parties to jointly achieve a variety of tasks without compromising their privacy. A special case of SMPC is secure 2-party computation (S2PC), where two distrustful parties wish to compute the output of a function on their inputs while keeping them unknown to each other. Protocols for S2PC can be used as buildings blocks in more complicated SMPC tasks, therefore a security property that one would like them to have is universal composability (UC), i.e. they should remain secure when they are arbitrarily composed with other protocols and/or instances of themselves. Fulfilling such a strong security requirement normally comes at the cost of making assumptions that restrict the possible strategies of a malicious party. A class of widely employed assumptions are the so-called hardware assumptions that leverage the hardware’s features in the implementation of a cryptographic protocol. In this context, Physical Uncloneable Functions (PUFs) were introduced, i.e. physical objects that have been manufactured through an uncontrollable physical process, and as such it is practically impossible to clone them even for their manufacturer. Moreover, their response to some physical stimulus cannot be predicted. The properties of uncloneability and unpredictability make them suitable for many security applications, and they are frequently used to securely realise different tasks. As far as the classical case is concerned, there is already a solid literature about developing UC-secure protocols for S2PC assuming access to PUFs. In this project we will explore the potential of PUFs as an assumption in quantum UC-secure S2PC. We will work along two different lines, which, in due course, we will combine to obtain meaningful conclusions about the actual usefulness of PUFs for different implementations of quantum UC-secure S2PC. The first line of work is to [shortened; the full text is on the OpenAIRE page]

Original source.

Source: OpenAIRE Graph: projects of national funders, OpenAIRE, from the project data of Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT). Retrieved 2026-10-22. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (OpenAIRE Graph). Selected metadata, adapted presentation; the publisher's record is authoritative. No endorsement by the source is implied. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).

AI-assisted summary: PUFSeQure is a project funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. with a grant of EUR 49,986.90, running from February 1, 2025, to January 31, 2027, focusing on secure multi-party computation in quantum cryptography. Suggested technology pillar: communication. Generated by AI from the public source text; it may contain errors and the original source is authoritative.