Impossibility of Quantum Bit Commitment, a Categorical Perspective

Abstract

Bit commitment is a cryptographic task in which Alice commits a bit to Bob such that she cannot change the value of the bit after her commitment and Bob cannot learn the value of the bit before Alice opens her commitment. According to the Mayers–Lo–Chau (MLC) no-go theorem, ideal bit commitment is impossible within quantum theory. In the information theoretic-reconstruction of quantum theory, the impossibility of quantum bit commitment is one of the three information-theoretic constraints that characterize quantum theory. In this paper, we first provide a very simple proof of the MLC no-go theorem and its quantitative generalization. Then, we formalize bit commitment in the theory of dagger monoidal categories. We show that in the setting of dagger monoidal categories, the impossibility of bit commitment is equivalent to the unitary equivalence of purification.