[Cryptography] Cryptography topic for Research Paper

Miroslav Kratochvil exa.exa at gmail.com
Thu May 8 04:24:23 EDT 2014


>
>
> 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.
>

Actually, I'm honestly afraid that there aren't any practical quantum
computers in India as well as in any other country. State-of-art quantum
computers are able, AFAIK, to compute that 21=3*7 and solve some limited
linear-optimization stuff, and not much else; moreover, quantum setup for
actual quantum-cryptographical bit transmission is going to require
something a lot different than quantum computer.

In short, if you want to get practical with this research, it's going to
get tremendously expensive.

> 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.

That's a good point, and a very useful one -- while quantum stuff is
expensive and probably isn't going to get into common usage anytime soon,
there is strong fear that anyone who builds first capable-enough quantum
computer will "just be able to break anything". Someone called this fear
"post-quantum cryptography" and there's a good amount of research already
done that way.

DJB's website is a good starting point: http://pqcrypto.org/

Any theoretical work that would provide assurance that quantum computers
really can't break the post-quantum cryptosystem varieties (MQE, McEliece,
Hashes, NTRU) would be really cool. There could be also questions whether
(some) current symmetric ciphers are quantum resistant - everyone assumes
they generally are, but I've seen no actual results in that way.


Well, I hope this helps you with your choice.

With regards,
-mk
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