Closed timelike curves enable perfect state distinguishability

The causal self-consistency condition for closed timelike curves can give rise to nonlinear interactions on chronology-respecting qubits. We demonstrate that particular unitary interactions between closed timelike curve qubits and chronology-respecting qubits allow perfect distinguishability of nonorthogonal states, and provide a constructive proof for an arbitrary number of nonorthogonal states. This has a number of highly significant consequences. For example, an adversary with access to closed timelike curves can break the B92, BB84, and SARG04 quantum key distribution protocols, or any prepare-and-measure quantum key distribution scheme. Our result also implies that a party with access to closed timelike curves can violate the Holevo bound by accessing more than $\log(N)$ bits of information from an $N$-dimensional quantum state. In principle, he can transmit an arbitrarily large amount of classical information with a quantum system of fixed size. We discuss the implications of this for quantum cloning.