The Trivial Bound of Entropic Uncertainty Relations

Abstract

Entropic uncertainty relations are underpinning to compute the quantitative security bound in quantum cryptographic applications, such as quantum random number generation (QRNG) and quantum key distribution (QKD). All security proofs derive a relation between the information accessible to the legitimate group and the maximum knowledge that an adversary may have gained, Eve, which exploits entropic uncertainty relations to lower bound Eve's uncertainty about the raw key generated by one party, Alice. The standard entropic uncertainty relations is to utilize the smooth min- and max-entropies to show these cryptographic applications' security by computing the overlap of two incompatible measurements or positive-operator valued measures (POVMs). This paper draws one case of the POVM-versioned standard entropic uncertainty relation yielding the trivial bound since the maximum overlap in POVMs always produces the trivial value, "one." So, it fails to tie the smooth min-entropy to show the security of the quantum cryptographic application.