The causal structure of Minkowski space time: possibilities and impossibilities of secure positioning

Abstract

Secure positioning, a prover located at a specified position convinces a set of verifiers at distant reference stations that he/she is indeed at the specific position, is considered to be impossible if the prover and verifiers have no pre-shared data while dishonest provers have an arbitrary amount of pre-shared entanglement [Nature 479, 307-308 (2011)]. We argue here that current impossibility results for secure positioning are the upshot of not utilizing full powers of relativistic quantum information theory and show that secure positioning and hence position-based quantum cryptography is possible if causal structure of Minkowski space time and quantum non-locality is used properly.