The New Math of Quantum Cryptography

"Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That's because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick for solving them will doom most forms of cryptography. Several years ago, researchers found a radically new approach to encryption that lacks this potential weak spot. The approach exploits the peculiar features of quantum physics."

"But this striking discovery relied on unrealistic assumptions. The result was "more of a proof of concept," said Fermi Ma, a cryptography researcher at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in Berkeley, California. "It is not a statement about the real world." Now, a new paper by two cryptographers has laid out a path to quantum cryptography without those outlandish assumptions. "This paper is saying that if certain other conjectures are true, then quantum cryptography must exist," Ma said."

"You can think of modern cryptography as a tower with three essential parts. The first part is the bedrock deep beneath the tower, which is made of hard mathematical problems. The tower itself is the second part-there you can find specific cryptographic protocols that let you send private messages, sign digital documents, cast secret ballots, and more. In between, securing those day-to-day applications to mathematical bedrock, is a foundation made of building blocks called one-way functions."

Cryptographers value hard mathematical problems because those problems underpin the security of modern encryption; solving them would break most cryptography. A new quantum-based approach eliminates reliance on those classical hard problems and can perform a wider range of tasks than earlier quantum schemes. Earlier demonstrations relied on unrealistic assumptions and functioned mainly as proofs of concept. A recent paper proposes a route to quantum cryptography that removes those outlandish assumptions and ties the existence of quantum cryptography to alternative conjectures. Modern cryptography can be viewed as a tower: hard-problem bedrock, one-way-function foundation, and protocol-level constructions.

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