On the Cryptographic Foundations of Interactive Quantum Advantage
Kabir Tomer, Mark Zhandry · 2026
In this work, we study the hardness required to achieve proofs of quantumness (PoQ), which in turn capture (potentially interactive) quantum advantage. A “trivial” or non-interactive PoQ simply assumes an (efficiently-verifiable) average-case hard problem for classical computers that is easy for quantum computers. However, there is much interest in “non-trivial” PoQs that actually rely on quantum hardness assumptions, instead of an assumed separation between quantum and classical computation for search problems, especially since these are often a starting point for more sophisticated protocols such as classical verification of quantum computation (CVQC). We show several lower-bounds for the hardness required to achieve non-trivial PoQ, specifically showing that they likely require cryptographic hardness, with different types of cryptographic hardness being required for different variations of non-trivial PoQ. In particular, our results help explain the challenges in using lattices to build publicly verifiable PoQ and its various extensions such as CVQC.