Practical Relativistic Bit Commitment

Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive in which Alice wishes to commit a secret bit to Bob. Perfectly secure bit commitment between two mistrustful parties is impossible through an asynchronous exchange of quantum information. Perfect security is, however, possible when Alice and Bob each split into several agents exchanging classical information at times and locations suitably chosen to satisfy specific relativistic constraints. In this Letter we first revisit a previously proposed scheme [C. Crépeau et al., Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 7073, 407 (2011)] that realizes bit commitment using only classical communication. We prove that the protocol is secure against quantum adversaries for a duration limited by the light-speed communication time between the locations of the agents. We then propose a novel multiround scheme based on finite-field arithmetic that extends the commitment time beyond this limit, and we prove its security against classical attacks. Finally, we present an implementation of these protocols using dedicated hardware and we demonstrate a 2 ms-long bit commitment over a distance of 131 km. By positioning the agents on antipodal points on the surface of Earth, the commitment time could possibly be extended to 212 ms.

Figure 1

(a) Experimental setup. (b) Space-time diagram of the experimental setup.