Chandran et al. (SIAM J. Comput.14) formally introduced the cryptographic task of position verification, where they also showed that it cannot be achieved by classical protocols. In this work, we initiate the study of position verification protocols
with classical verifiers. We identify that proofs of quantumness (and thus computational assumptions) are necessary for such position verification protocols. For the other direction, we adapt the proof of quantumness protocol by Brakerski et al. (FOCS18) to instantiate such a position verification protocol. As a result, we achieve classically verifiable position verification assuming the quantum hardness of Learning with Errors. Along the way, we develop the notion of 1-of-2 non-local soundness for the framework of 1-of-2 puzzles, first introduced by Radian and Sattath (AFT19), which can be viewed as a computational unclonability property. We show that 1-of-2 non-local soundness follows from the standard 2-of-2 soundness, which could be of independent interest.
Function inversion is the problem that given a random function $f: [M] to [N]$, we want to find pre-image of any image $f^{-1}(y)$ in time $T$. In this work, we revisit this problem under the preprocessing model where we can compute some auxiliary in
formation or advice of size $S$ that only depends on $f$ but not on $y$. It is a well-studied problem in the classical settings, however, it is not clear how quantum algorithms can solve this task any better besides invoking Grovers algorithm, which does not leverage the power of preprocessing. Nayebi et al. proved a lower bound $ST^2 ge tildeOmega(N)$ for quantum algorithms inverting permutations, however, they only consider algorithms with classical advice. Hhan et al. subsequently extended this lower bound to fully quantum algorithms for inverting permutations. In this work, we give the same asymptotic lower bound to fully quantum algorithms for inverting functions for fully quantum algorithms under the regime where $M = O(N)$. In order to prove these bounds, we generalize the notion of quantum random access code, originally introduced by Ambainis et al., to the setting where we are given a list of (not necessarily independent) random variables, and we wish to compress them into a variable-length encoding such that we can retrieve a random element just using the encoding with high probability. As our main technical contribution, we give a nearly tight lower bound (for a wide parameter range) for this generalized notion of quantum random access codes, which may be of independent interest.
