Testing quantum circuits and detecting insecure encryption

Abstract

We show that computational problem of testing the behaviour of quantum circuits is hard for the class of problems known as QMA that can be verified efficiently with a quantum computer. This result is a generalization of the techniques previously used to prove the hardness of other problem on quantum circuits. We use this result to show the QMA-hardness of a weak version of the problem of detecting the insecurity of a symmetric-key quantum encryption system, or alternately the problem of determining when a quantum channel is not private. We also give a QMA protocol for the problem of detecting insecure encryption to show that it is QMA-complete.