Pre-transfer verification for publicly verifiable quantum money

Develop a pre-transfer verification mechanism for the publicly verifiable quantum money scheme that uses one-time memories and collision-resistant hash functions, enabling a receiver to verify a banknote's authenticity before accepting the associated quantum OTM states from a potentially malicious sender, without taking possession of those states.

Background

The proposed scheme constructs publicly verifiable quantum money using one-time memories (OTMs) built from conjugate coding and trusted hardware, together with collision-resistant hash functions. Verification is performed via a cut-and-choose procedure that opens a random subset of OTMs and checks their revealed pre-images against signed hashes; unopened OTMs are retained for future verifications.

As discussed by the authors, the current design allows inspection of classical pre-images before transfer, but this only assures security against honest senders. Enabling a receiver to verify authenticity without first taking possession of the quantum OTM states would mitigate risks from malicious senders. Achieving this likely requires additional rounds of interaction or cryptographic commitments to allow verification of the quantum states without destructive measurement.