Quantum Cryptography and Autoformalization in Lean
quant-ph
Submitted: 2026-10-12
Updated: 2026-10-12
Code: https://github.com/anthropics/fermats-last-theorem
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Quantum key distribution provides secure communication by relying on physics principles and mathematical reasoning.
Abstract
Quantum key distribution provides secure communication by relying on physics principles and mathematical reasoning. Security proofs across the field can contain gaps, often between individually valid theorems integrated under mismatched assumptions. We produce an end-to-end security theorem formalized in the Lean proof assistant, eliminating hidden hypotheses by building only on Lean's standard axioms. Our proof covers composable security of the entanglement-based qubit BB84 protocol against coherent attacks by the postselection technique, accounting for finite block size, and is written in a language that enforces local operations and classical communication to help ensure a faithful representation of the protocol. The proof itself was enabled by LLM-based autoformalization, and with the proof complete, we used the same pipeline as a discovery machine, reducing the finite-size penalty on the key rate. Our work sets a reproducible standard for security arguments in quantum cryptography and shows how formal proof engines can accelerate discovery across quantum information science.
Sources
- Studying Stabilizer de Finetti Theorems and Possible Applications in Quantum Information Processing
- A rigorous and complete security proof of decoy-state BB84 quantum key distribution
- Protocol-level description and self-contained security proof of decoy-state BB84 QKD protocol
- Formal Methods for Quantum Programs: A Survey
- An Automated Analysis of the Security of Quantum Key Distribution
- A Machine-Verified Proof of a Quantum-Optimization Conjecture
- A Formalization of the Generalized Quantum Stein's Lemma in Lean
- Five Proofs of Chernoff's Bound with Applications
Related papers
- Reconquering Bell sampling on qudits: stabilizer learning and testing, quantum pseudorandomness bounds, and more
- Encrypted clones can leak: Classification of informative subsets in Quantum Encrypted Cloning
- Polynomial-time classical and quantum simulation of quantum impurity models
- Incoherent Imaging with Spatially Structured Quantum Probes
- A quasiparticle-protected superconducting qubit
- Theory of quantum-enhanced interferometry with general Markovian light sources