One-way functions are central to classical cryptography. They are both necessary for the existence of non-trivial classical cryptosystems, and sufficient to realize meaningful primitives including commitments, pseudorandom generators and digital signatures. At the same time, a mounting body of evidence suggests that assumptions even weaker than one-way functions may suffice for many cryptographic tasks of interest in a quantum world, including bit commitments and secure multi-party computation. This work studies one-way state generators, a natural quantum relaxation of one-way functions. Given a secret key, a one-way state generator outputs a hard to invert quantum state. A fundamental question is whether this type of quantum one-wayness suffices to realize quantum cryptography. We obtain an affirmative answer to this question, by proving that one-way state generators with pure state outputs imply quantum bit commitments and secure multiparty computation. Along the way, we build an intermediate primitive with classical outputs, which we call a (quantum) one-way puzzle. Our main technical contribution is a proof that one-way puzzles imply quantum bit commitments.
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