[Cryptography] Cryptography topic for Research Paper

[Sanjeet Suhag]

Hello all!

First, thank you all for replying to my question asking for a research topic for my extended essay. It was great to take inputs from people with substantial knowledge of cryptography. 

The main reason I chose quantum cryptography as a topic is because as a student of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science (all of which I have opted for at a Higher Level, which basically means that we’re studying a little more advanced sections of these subjects), I wanted my research to be a mix of all these. Now, I want to mainly tackle the Computer Science aspect, however I have just studied Discrete Probability in Mathematics and Quantum Physics in Physics. So, based on a little previous knowledge, I jumped on the opportunity of researching on a topic like Quantum Cryptography.

However, I’m from India. And, as far as I know, we don’t have many functioning quantum computers in India, so it will be extremely tough for me to gather any primary data. Also, upon doing some other research online, I saw that doing work in this field of study can be extremely difficult for me, given that I’m just in high school. Although I’m fully confident of my competence of doing research on a topic like this, I do have certain doubts on the practicality of such an attempt.

So, I’m not asking the same question again here. I’m just wondering whether or not, I should pursue Quantum Cryptography. I could get away with any other topic, like performance of cross-platform apps (for example written in Java) vs native apps, however I chose Cryptography because it is by far one of the most appealing areas of study for me.

If not Computer Science, I definitely will look at this area from a Mathematical perspective, as we also have to do an exploration in Mathematics which requires us to derive any new formula, or relationship. It might not be ground-breaking, but it must be new and not a rehash of previously known formulae. I wanted to figure out, or try to figure out, a relationship between the qubits in a quantum computer and the time taken to crack today’s encryption methods.

Cheers,
Sanjeet.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20140508/85759715/attachment.html>