Symmetries and security of a quantum-public-key encryption based on single-qubit rotations

Exploring the symmetries underlying a previously proposed encryption scheme which relies on single-qubit rotations, we derive an improved upper bound on the maximum information that an eavesdropper might extract from all the available copies of the public key. Subsequently, the robustness of the scheme is investigated in the context of attacks that address each public-key qubit independently. The attacks under consideration make use of projective measurements on single qubits and their efficiency is compared to attacks that address many qubits collectively and require complicated quantum operations.