Bounding the seed length of Miller and Shi's unbounded randomness expansion protocol

Abstract

Recent randomness expansion protocols have been proposed which are able to generate an unbounded amount of randomness from a finite amount of truly random initial seed. One such protocol, given by Miller and Shi, uses a pair of non-signaling untrusted quantum mechanical devices. These play XOR games with inputs given by the user in order to generate an output. Here we present an analysis of the required seed size, giving explicit upper bounds for the number of initial random bits needed to jump-start the protocol. The bits output from such a protocol are $\varepsilon$-close to uniform even against quantum adversaries. Our analysis yields that for a statistical distance of $\varepsilon=10^{-1}$ and $\varepsilon=10^{-6}$ from uniformity, the number of required bits is smaller than 225,000 and 715,000, respectively; in general it grows as $O(\log\frac{1}{\varepsilon})$.