Generalised entropy accumulation

The min-entropy of a quantum system A conditioned on another quantum system E describes how much randomness can be extracted from A with respect to an adversary in possession of E. This quantity plays a crucial role in quantum cryptography: the security proofs of many quantum cryptographic protocols reduce to showing a lower bound on such a min-entropy. Here, we develop a new tool, called generalised entropy accumulation, for computing such bounds. Concretely, we consider a sequential process in which each step outputs a system A i and updates a side information register E. We prove that if this process satisfies a natural "non-signalling" condition between past outputs and future side information, the min-entropy of the outputs A 1 , . . . , A n conditioned on the side information E at the end of the process can be bounded from below by a sum of von Neumann entropies associated with the individual steps. This is a generalisation of the entropy accumulation theorem (EAT) [DFR20], which deals with a more restrictive model of side information: there, past side information cannot be updated in subsequent rounds, and newly generated side information has to satisfy a Markov condition.

Due to its more general model of side-information, our generalised EAT can be applied more easily and to a broader range of cryptographic protocols. In particular, it is the first general tool that is applicable to mistrustful device-independent cryptography. To demonstrate this, we give the first security proof for blind randomness expansion [MS17] against general adversaries. Furthermore, our generalised EAT can be used to give improved security proofs for quantum key distribution [MR22], and also has applications beyond quantum cryptography.