Information security in a quantum world

  • Authors:
  • Renato Renner

  • Affiliations:
  • Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • MEMICS'11 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Mathematical and Engineering Methods in Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

It is well known that classical computationally-secure cryptosystems may be susceptible to quantum attacks, i.e., attacks by adversaries able to process quantum information. A prominent example is the RSA public key cryptosystem, whose security is based on the hardness of factoring; it can be broken using a quantum computer running Shor's efficient factoring algorithm. In this extended abstract, we review an argument which shows that a similar problem can arise even if a cryptosystem provides information-theoretic security. As long as its security analysis is carried out within classical information theory, attacks by quantum adversaries cannot in general be excluded.