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Staff Profile

Dr Ittoop Puthoor

Lecturer in Quantum Information Security

Background

Ittoop is a Lecturer in the School of Computing at Newcastle University. He has a strong interdisciplinary research background in Computer Science and Physics. His interests is to develop and evaluate new quantum technologies for computing and communications. In particular, he is interested in the interplay between Physics and Computer Science, to develop new theories and tools for analysing and guaranteeing the security of quantum cryptosystems. 


Ittoop is associated with the AMBER group (Advanced Model-based Engineering). He was previously involved with the UK Quantum Technology hub for Quantum Communications, where he worked as a senior research associate. He worked in multidisciplinary projects concerning quantum cryptography, quantum information, quantum computing and measurements. This involved collaborations with various academic institutions across UK and also industries like Toshiba Cambridge and BT.


Ittoop received the prestigious Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Scholarship to do his PhD in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. Ittoop worked with the School of Computing Science and the School of Physics and Astronomy for his interdisciplinary PhD research. His thesis titled “Theory and applications of quantum process calculus” was selected for presentation at the EDAA/ACM SIGDA PhD Forum of the Design, Automation and Test in Europe conference (DATE 2015), which is an international conference and exhibition for electronic system design, and test. Moreover, he has an MTech (Masters of Technology) in Applied Optics at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and a MSc in Physics from Madras Christian College, Chennai.


Area of expertise: Quantum Cryptography, Quantum Formal Methods, Quantum Information.


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Research

My research interests are in three key areas: quantum cryptography, quantum formal methods, and quantum measurements, focussing on fundamental questions to applications in quantum information processing and quantum communications. I am particularly interested in the development of quantum crypto protocols like quantum digital signatures (QDS). QDS provide information-theoretic security which cannot be broken even if a computer has unlimited computing power.


Other area of my research interest is to develop tools from formal methods, for modelling and verifying the correctness of more complex quantum technologies. Since quantum information processing systems has the potential to be more practical and widely used in future, formal methods will play a major role in the design and engineering of of these systems just as they are essential for “classical” systems.


PhD Opportunity: Currently, I am recruiting a PhD student to start in September 2024. If you are interested in applying to do a PhD in one of my research areas, please contact me.


Grants and Projects


Current


Recent

  •   EPSRC Quantum Communications Hub Phase 2 (Named RA, 2019-2024, EP/T001011/1)
  •   EPSRC Quantum Communications Hub Phase 1 (RA, 2015-2019, EP/M013472/1)


Other Research Involvements

Publications

  • Articles

    • Puthoor IV. Formal verification of higher dimensional quantum communication protocols. 2025.
    • Stroh L, Peat JT, Kroneberg M, Puthoor IV, Andersson E. Quantum Rabin oblivious transfer using two pure states. Physical Review Research 2024, 6, 043004.
    • Reichmuth D, Puthoor IV, Wallden P, Andersson E. Incomplete quantum oblivious transfer with perfect one-sided security. Physical Review Research 2024. Submitted.
    • Stroh L, Horova N, Starek R, Puthoor IV, Micuda M, Dusek M, Andersson E. Noninteractive xor Quantum Oblivious Transfer: Optimal Protocols and Their Experimental Implementations. PRX Quantum 2023, 4, 020320.
    • Webb JW, Puthoor IV, Ho J, Crickmore J, Blakely E, Fedrizzi A, Andersson E. Experimental demonstration of optimal unambiguous two-out-of-four quantum state elimination. Physical Review Research 2023, 5, 023094.
    • Pelet Y, Puthoor IV, Venkatachalam N, Wengerowsky S, Loncaric M, Neumann SP, Liu B, Samec Z, Stipcevic M, Ursin R, Andersson E, Rarity JG, Aktas D, Joshi SK. Unconditionally secure digital signatures implemented in an eight-user quantum network. New Journal of Physics 2022, 24, 093038.
    • Amiri R, Starek R, Reichmuth D, Puthoor IV, Micuda M, Mista L, Dusek M, Wallden P, Andersson E. Imperfect 1-Out-of-2 Quantum Oblivious Transfer: Bounds, a Protocol, and its Experimental Implementation. PRX Quantum 2021, 2, 010335.
    • Crickmore J, Puthoor IV, Ricketti B, Croke S, Hillery M, Andersson E. Unambiguous quantum state elimination for qubit sequences. PRR 2020, 2, 013256.
    • Dada AC, McCutcheon W, Andersson E, Crickmore J, Puthoor IV, Gerardot BD, McMillan A, Rarity J, Oulton R. Optimal simultaneous measurements of incompatible observables of a single photon. Optica 2019, 6, 257.
    • Yin HL, Wang WL, Tang YL, Zhao Q, Liu H, Sun XX, Zhang WJ, Li H, Puthoor IV, You LX, Andersson E, Wang Z, Liu Y, Jiang X, Ma X, Zhang Q, Curty M, Chen TY, Pan JW. Experimental measurement-device-independent quantum digital signatures over a metropolitan network. PRA 2017, 95, 042338.
    • Roberts GL, Lucamarini M, Yuan ZL, Dynes JF, Comandar CL, Sharpe AW, Shields AJ, Curty M, Puthoor IV, Andersson E. Experimental measurement-device-independent quantum digital signatures. Nature Communications 2017, 8, 1098.
    • Kleczkowska K, Puthoor IV, Bain L, Andersson E. Benchmarking the state comparison amplifier. PRA 2017, 96, 042309.
    • Puthoor IV, Amiri R, Wallden P, Curty M, Andersson E. Measurement-device-independent quantum digital signatures. PRA 2016, 94, 022328.

  • Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstracts)

    • Andersson E, Stroh L, Puthoor IV, Reichmuth D, Horova N, Starek R, Micuda M, Dusek M, Wallden P. Quantum cryptography beyond quantum key distribution: variants of quantum oblivious transfer. In: Quantum Computing, Communication, and Simulation III. 2023, San Francisco: SPIE.
    • Joshi SK, Huang Z, Fletcher A, Solomons N, Puthoor IV, Pelet Y, Aktas D, Lupo C, Quintavalle AO, Wengerowsky S, Tessinari RS, Alia O, Wang R, Clark M, Venkatachalam N, Hugues-Salas E, Kanellos GT, Loncaric M, Neumann SP, Liu B, Scheidl T, Samec Z, Kling L, Qiu A, Nejabati R, Simeonidou D, Andersson E, Pirandola S, Ursin R, Stipcevic M, Rarity JG. Protocols beyond just qkd on an eight-user quantum network. In: CLEO: Applications and Technology. 2021, Optica.
    • Joshi SK, Huang Z, Fletcher A, Solomons N, Puthoor IV, Pelet Y, Aktas D, Lupo C, Quintavalle AO, Wengerowsky S, Tessinari RS, Alia O, Wang R, Clark M, Venkatachalam N, Hugues-Salas E, Kanellos GT, Loncaric M, Neumann SP, Liu B, Scheidl T, Samec Z, Kling L, Qiu A, Nejabati R, Simeonidou D, Andersson E, Pirandola S, Ursin R, Stipcevic M, Rarity JG. Entanglement Based Quantum Networks: Protocols, AI control plane & coexistence with classical communication. In: Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe and European Quantum Electronics Conference. 2021.
    • Roberts GL, Lucamarini M, Yuan ZL, Dynes JF, Comandar LC, Sharpe AW, Shields AJ, Curty M, Puthoor IV, Andersson E. Reconfigurable network for quantum digital signatures mediated by measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution. In: QCrypt. 2017.
    • Gay SJ, Puthoor IV. Equational reasoning about quantum protocols. In: Reversible Computation RC 2015. 2015, LNCS.
    • Franke-Arnold S, Gay SJ, Puthoor IV. Verification of linear optical quantum computing using quantum process calculus. In: Workshop on Expressiveness in Concurrency and Structural Operational Semantics (EXPRESS/SOS 2014). 2014.
    • Franke-Arnold S, Gay SJ, Puthoor IV. Quantum process calculus for linear optical quantum computing. In: Reversible Computation (RC) 2013. 2013.
    • Gay SJ, Puthoor IV. Application of quantum process calculus to higher dimensional quantum protocols. In: Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL) 2012. 2012.
    • Davidson TAS, Gay SJ, Nagarajan R, Puthoor IV. Analysis of a quantum error correcting code using quantum process calculus. In: Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL). 2011.

  • Online Publications

    • Hillery M, Andersson E, Puthoor IV. A group-theoretic approach to elimination measurements of qubit sequences. 2020. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.02055. Submitted.
    • Puthoor IV. Theory and applications of quantum process calculus. 2015. Available at: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/5986/.