In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico interview Or Sattath, Assistant Professor at the Ben-Gurion University in the Computer Science department. This is the 2nd episode with Or on this show, continuing the conversation around Quantum Cryptography. This time, he describes how we can transition from a pre-quantum to a post-quantum environment, looking at existing systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum. He covers why the methods used in the transition will be important, techniques on how this could be executed and the challenges in designing these techniques and the complications that can arise. Finally, they go on to discuss Quantum Money and recent works in this area.
Here’s some additional links for this episode:
- Part 1 – Episode 288: Quantum Cryptography with Or Sattath
- Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer by Shor
- Shor’s Algorithm
- Grover’s Algorithm
- A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search by Grover
- Fawkescoin: A cryptocurrency without public-key cryptography by Bonneau and Miller
- Bitcoin is not quantum-safe, and how we can fix it when needed by Buterin
- Cryptographic canaries and backups by Justin Drake
Notes and recommended links by Or Sattath:
- NIST post-quantum standardization for post-quantum digital signatures and public-key encryption (or, more precisely, Key Encapsulation Mechanism, KEM). These are classical schemes that, unlike almost all the existing schemes that are used in practice, are secure against quantum adversaries.
- Signature Lifting (arXiv link) is discussed as a technique to migrate to post-quantum signatures, especially for those who didn't prepare in advance. Here's a recommended Twitter thread summarizing the results by Shai Wyborski, Or’s co-author.
- An approach to upgrade Bitcoin to quantum money is available here. This uses a cryptographic primitive which is called quantum lightning, which was introduced here.
- Some smart contacts capabilities can be supported as well. This construction is based on one-shot signatures, which isdiscussed in some detail during the interview. The bottom line of this work is that we can have the most important utility that Bitcoin provides, without the need for a blockchain, or any other consensus mechanism.
- Uncloneable cryptography was discussed during the interview. Quantum encryption with certified deletion was discussed as an interesting example of a property that can be achieved only in quantum cryptography.
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