From Notices of the AMS
Group-based Cryptography in the Quantum Era
by
Delaram Kahrobaei
Ramón Flores
Marialaura Noce
Communicated by Reza Malek-Madani
Introduction
Today's digital infrastructure relies on cryptography in order to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of digital transactions. At the heart of these techniques is public key cryptography, which provides a method for two parties to communicate privately, despite the lack of any pre-arranged security keys.
These protocols mainly rely on the fact that deciphering encoded communications is tantamount to solving mathematical problems which are widely thought to be infeasible (two such examples are the factoring problem and the discrete logarithm problem). Yet we know that with the advent of large-scale quantum computers (devices that compute according to the laws of quantum mechanics), both the factoring and discrete logarithm problems are completely broken, meaning that our existing public-key cryptography infrastructure has become insecure.
We are thus at a crossroads in terms of security: Is the security of our digital infrastructure ready for the advent of quantum computers?
- Also in Notices
- Mixing Surfaces, Algebra, and Geometry
- The Icosidodecahedron
