[Cryptography] cryptography Digest, Vol 13, Issue 6

Hanno Böck hanno at hboeck.de
Wed May 7 17:47:08 EDT 2014


On Wed, 7 May 2014 21:45:11 +0530
Sanjeet Suhag <suhagsanjeet at gmail.com> wrote:

> I’m a 17 year old high school student currently studying for my last
> year in high school. I’m a student of the IB diploma and I have to do
> an extended essay, which is essentially a research paper on a topic
> related to any subject. As a programmer, I wanted to do something
> related to Computer Science. I have my fair share of technical
> knowledge of cryptography and it is clearly one of my favourite
> topics to do a research paper on. Since almost everything else has
> already been done in standard cryptography, I believe that a
> confluence of Quantum Computing and its affect on the current
> cryptographic standards would be useful. So, as most people out here
> have much more knowledge than me on topics like this, could you
> please suggest whether or not this is a feasible topic of
> investigation, or if not, is there anything else that I can do (i.e.
> some other technical aspect of Cryptography) ?

It is a good topic I think. At the moment it's kind of corner science
with very few people caring, but I'm almost certain it is a topic that
will gain much more attention in the upcoming years.

Starting points: There's an irregular conference on post quantum
cryptography:
http://pqcrypto.org/

Also, there's a basic introduction by DJB linked there:
http://www.springer.com/math/numbers/book/978-3-540-88701-0?detailsPage=samplePages

The bottom line is: If a quantum computer would appear soon, we're in
trouble, because basically we have nothing usable today. There are a
couple of algorithms that are believed to be quantumcomputer-safe, but
they mostly have two problems:
a) often impractical to use due to very large keys
b) not that much research done to investigate their security compared
to well-studied algs like RSA or ECC-based cryptosystems

The only thing that comes near a usable algorithm is ntru.
Unfortunately it's patented and therefore can't be used widely.


What you should be aware of is that quantum computing has almost
nothing to do with what is called quantum cryptography or quantum key
exchange. These are cryptosystems that rely on physical properties
instead of math. I mostly share DJBs opinion on quantum cryptography:
It's probably not really usable in practise and mostly a marketing gag.

-- 
Hanno Böck
http://hboeck.de/

mail/jabber: hanno at hboeck.de
GPG: BBB51E42
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