Quantum Advantage in Cryptography

Abstract

Ever since its inception, cryptography has been caught in a vicious circle: Cryptographers keep inventing methods to hide information, and cryptanalysts break them, prompting cryptographers to invent even more sophisticated encryption schemes, and so on. But could it be that quantum information technology breaks this circle? At first sight, it looks as if it just lifts the competition between cryptographers and cryptanalysts to the next level. Indeed, quantum computers will render most of today's public key cryptosystems insecure. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to believe that cryptographers will ultimately prevail over cryptanalysts. Quantum cryptography allows us to build communication schemes whose secrecy relies only on the laws of physics and some minimum assumptions about the cryptographic hardware - leaving basically no room for an attack. While we are not yet there, this article provides an overview of the principles and state of the art of quantum cryptography, as well as an assessment of current challenges and prospects for overcoming them.

31 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. To appear in the AIAA journal

References in corpus (6)

• Hacking commercial quantum cryptography systems by tailored bright illumination
• Device-independent quantum key distribution secure against collective attacks
• Progress in satellite quantum key distribution
• Post-selection technique for quantum channels with applications to quantum cryptography
• No extension of quantum theory can have improved predictive power
• Controlling passively-quenched single photon detectors by bright light

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Entanglement and thermokinetic uncertainty relations in coherent mesoscopic transport
• Improving the performance of quantum cryptography by using the encryption of the error correction data
• Boosting quantum key distribution via the end-to-end loss control
• Numerical simulations of atmospheric quantum channels
• Overcoming Noise Limitations in QKD with Quantum Privacy Amplification
• An entanglement-based protocol for simultaneous reciprocal information exchange between 2 players
• Universally-Charging Protocols for Quantum Batteries: A No-Go Theorem
• One-to-Many Simultaneous Secure Quantum Information Transmission
• The Role of Quantum Computing in Advancing Scientific High-Performance Computing: A perspective from the ADAC Institute
• A distributed and parallel $(k,n)$ QSS scheme with verification capability
• Time correlations in atmospheric quantum channels
• Secure One-Sided Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution Under Collective Attacks with Enhanced Robustness
• A novel $2$ \& $3$ player scheme for Quantum Direct Communication
• HQNET: Harnessing Quantum Noise for Effective Training of Quantum Neural Networks in NISQ Era
• Circular-beam approximation for quantum channels in a turbulent atmosphere
• PQC-Enhanced QKD Networks: A Layered Approach