  The existence of quantum uncertainty relations is the essential reason that
some classically impossible cryptographic primitives become possible when
quantum communication is allowed. One direct operational manifestation of these
uncertainty relations is a purely quantum effect referred to as information
locking. A locking scheme can be viewed as a cryptographic protocol in which a
uniformly random n-bit message is encoded in a quantum system using a classical
key of size much smaller than n. Without the key, no measurement of this
quantum state can extract more than a negligible amount of information about
the message, in which case the message is said to be "locked". Furthermore,
knowing the key, it is possible to recover, that is "unlock", the message. In
this paper, we make the following contributions by exploiting a connection
between uncertainty relations and low-distortion embeddings of L2 into L1. We
introduce the notion of metric uncertainty relations and connect it to
low-distortion embeddings of L2 into L1. A metric uncertainty relation also
implies an entropic uncertainty relation. We prove that random bases satisfy
uncertainty relations with a stronger definition and better parameters than
previously known. Our proof is also considerably simpler than earlier proofs.
We apply this result to show the existence of locking schemes with key size
independent of the message length. We give efficient constructions of metric
uncertainty relations. The bases defining these metric uncertainty relations
are computable by quantum circuits of almost linear size. This leads to the
first explicit construction of a strong information locking scheme. Moreover,
we present a locking scheme that is close to being implementable with current
technology. We apply our metric uncertainty relations to exhibit communication
protocols that perform quantum equality testing.
