Brassard, Gilles

Date: Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Time: 15:30
Place: USI Lugano, room A-23, Red Building (Via G. Buffi 13)
Host: Stefan Wolf

Cryptography in a Quantum World

Gilles Brassard
Université de Montréal, Canada

Cryptography, although practiced as an art and science for thousands of years, had to wait until the end of the 1940s before Claude Shannon gave it a strong mathematical foundation. However, Shannon's approach was rooted is his own information theory, itself inspired by the classical physics of Newton. But our world is ruled by the laws of quantum mechanics. When quantum-mechanical phenomena are considered, new vistas open up both for cryptographers (code makers) and cryptanalysts (code breakers). Some theorems (including by Shannon) remain mathematically correct, but become irrelevant in our quantum world. Most strikingly, it is possible for two people who do not share ahead of time a long secret key to communicate in perfect secrecy under the nose of an eavesdropper with unlimited computing power and whose technology is limited only by the known laws of physics. Conversely, quantum mechanics provides powerful tools to threaten the mechanisms that are currently used on the Internet to protect electronic transactions. Furthermore, it seems---but is not yet proven---that quantum mechanics provides more benefits to cryptanalysts than cryptographers if the latter are restricted to using only classical communication channels. So, in the end, is quantum mechanics a blessing or a curse to the protection of privacy? The jury is still out. No prior knowledge in quantum mechanics or cryptography will be expected from the audience.