The three fundamental information-theoretic constraints we shall be interested in are:

the impossibility of superluminal information transfer between two physical systems by performing measurements on one of them;

the impossibility of perfectly broadcasting the information contained in an unknown physical state; and

the impossibility of unconditionally secure bit commitment.
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 we here propose to raise the above constraints to the level of fundamental information-theoretic ‘laws of nature’ from which quantum theory can, we claim, be deduced. ...

Bit commitment is a cryptographic protocol in which one party, Alice, supplies an encoded bit to a second party, Bob. The information available in the encoding should be insufficient for Bob to ascertain the value of the bit, but sufficient, together with further information supplied by Alice at a subsequent stage when she is supposed to reveal the value of the bit, for Bob to be convinced that the protocol does not allow Alice to cheat by encoding the bit in a way that leaves her free to reveal either 0 or 1 at will.


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