Towards the Impossibility of Non-Signalling Privacy Amplification from Time-Like Ordering Constraints

Abstract: In the past few years there was a growing interest in proving the security of cryptographic protocols, such as key distribution protocols, from the sole assumption that the systems of Alice and Bob cannot signal to each other. This can be achieved by making sure that Alice and Bob perform their measurements in a space-like separated way (and therefore signalling is impossible according to the non-signalling postulate of relativity theory) or even by shielding their apparatus. Unfortunately, it was proven in [E. Haenggi, R. Renner, and S. Wolf. The impossibility of non-signaling privacy amplification] that, no matter what hash function we use, privacy amplification is impossible if we only impose non-signalling conditions between Alice and Bob and not within their systems. In this letter we reduce the gap between the assumptions of Haenggi et al. and the physical relevant assumptions, from an experimental point of view, which say that the systems can only signal forward in time within the systems of Alice and Bob. We consider a set of assumptions which is very close to the conditions above and prove that the impossibility result of Haenggi et al. still holds.