Verifiable blind observable estimation: A composably secure protocol for near-term quantum advantage tasks

Abstract: The rapid advance of quantum hardware is spotlighting pre-fault-tolerant tasks that may no longer be efficiently validated by classical means and are likely to run on potentially untrusted remote quantum servers. This motivates problem-independent verification protocols with rigorous guarantees. The Verifiable Blind Quantum Computation (VBQC) protocol provides delegated computation where the composable security spans the confidentiality and integrity of the computation. However, the success of these cryptographic protocols, especially their low space overhead, is unfortunately confined to problems that admit an algorithm whose output can be amplified through majority voting toward the correct solution. This leaves various notable near-term applications relying on observable estimation without efficient verification protocols. To address these needs, we introduce a protocol implementing Secure Delegated Observable Estimation (SDOE), which efficiently verifies observable estimation performed on an untrusted quantum machine. More precisely, it guarantees that the computed estimate is within some $\epsilon>0$ of the true expectation value or else it aborts. The required overhead is limited to adding test rounds that are not more complex than the unprotected computation that needs to be performed to implement the desired measurement on a given fiducial state; and in addition, the security error is negligible in the total number of rounds of the protocol.