Original version With This story appeared in How much warehouse.
Complex problems are usually not a welcome view. But cryptographers love them. This is because some complex mathematical problems are at the basis of the security of state-of-the-art encryption. Any clever trick to solve them will be doomed to most forms of cryptography.
A few years ago, scientists discovered radically new approach to encryption This potential tender place is missing. The approach uses special features of quantum physics. But unlike earlier quantum encryption schemes, which work only for several special tasks, a up-to-date approach can perform a much wider scope of tasks. And this can work, even if all problems at the basis of ordinary “classic” cryptography are easily solved.
But this striking discovery consisted of unrealistic assumptions. The result was “more proof of the concept,” he said Strong, butCryptography researcher at the Simons Institute for Theory of Computing in Berkeley, California. “This is not a real world statement.”
Now new paper Through two cryptographs, he developed a quantum cryptography path without these bizarre assumptions. “This article says that if some other hypottes are true, there must be quantum cryptography,” she said.
Castle in the sky
You can think about state-of-the-art cryptography as a tower with three basic parts. The first part is the basis of a deep under the tower, which is made of complex mathematical problems. The tower itself is the second part – you can find specific cryptographic protocols that allow you to send private messages, sign digital documents, fill secret ballotrs and many others.
In the meantime, securing these daily applications for mathematical substrate is the basis of component blocks called One -way functions. They are responsible for asymmetry associated with each encryption scheme. “It’s one way because you can encrypt messages, but you can’t decrypt them,” he said Mark ZhandryCryptograph at NTT Research.
In the 1980s, scientists proved that cryptography built at the top of the function will ensure the safety of many different tasks. But decades later they are still not sure that the basis is sturdy enough to support it. The problem is that the basis is made of special problems with complex – known as problems, e.g., which definition of functions is that it is straightforward to check whether any candidate solution is correct. (For example, hacking a number on its basic factors is a problem, e.g. complex to do for enormous numbers, but straightforward to check.)
Many of these problems seem to be complex, but IT specialists He couldn’t prove it. If someone discovers a brilliant algorithm for a quick solution to the most complex problems with e.g., the beds will fall apart, and the whole tower will collapse.
Unfortunately, you can’t just move your tower elsewhere. Foundation Tower-Functions of one way-sit only on the basis of problems, e.g.
To build a tower with more complex problems, cryptographers would need a up-to-date foundation that is not made of a one -way function. It seemed impossible only a few years ago, when scientists realized that quantum physics could facilitate.