Abstract

The next bit test was introduced by Blum and Micali and proved by Yao to be a universal test for cryptographic pseudorandom generators. On the other hand, no universal test for the cryptographic one-wayness of functions (or permutations) is known, although the existence of cryptographic pseudorandom generators is equivalent to that of cryptographic one-way functions. In the quantum computation model, Kashefi, Nishimura and Vedral gave a sufficient condition of (cryptographic) quantum one-way permutations and conjectured that the condition would be necessary. In this paper, we affirmatively settle their conjecture and complete a necessary and sufficient condition for quantum one-way permutations. The necessary and sufficient condition can be regarded as a universal test for quantum one-way permutations, since the condition is described as a collection of stepwise tests similar to the next bit test for pseudorandom generators.

Keywords: Quantum computation; Computational cryptography; One-way permutation; One-way function; Universal test