What do internet commerce, online banking, and updates to your phone apps have in common? All of them depend on modern public key cryptography for security. For example, there is the RSA cryptosystem that is used by many internet browsers, and there is the elliptic curve based ECDSA digital signature scheme that is used in many applications, including Bitcoin. All of these cryptographic construction are doomed if/when someone (NSA? Russia? China?) builds a full-scale operational quantum computer. It hasn’t happened yet, as far as we know, but there are vast resources being thrown at the problem, and slow-but-steady progress is being made. So the search is on for cryptographic algorithms that are secure against quantum computers. The first part of my talk will be a mix of math and history and prognostication centred around the themes of quantum computers and public key cryptography. The second part will discuss cryptographic constructions based on hard lattice problems, which is one of the approaches being proposed to build a post-quantum cryptographic infrastructure.
This video is part of the Number Theory Web Seminar series.
