{"id":1230,"date":"2017-01-30T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-30T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/?p=1230"},"modified":"2022-02-07T10:38:20","modified_gmt":"2022-02-07T10:38:20","slug":"quantum-cryptography-providing-privacy-to-common-citizens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/quantum-cryptography-providing-privacy-to-common-citizens\/1230\/","title":{"rendered":"Quantum cryptography: privacy for citizens"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Instituto de Telecomunica\u00e7\u00f5es in Lisbon, Portugal, is further developing revolutionary privacy solutions based on the laws of quantum mechanics<\/h2>\n

The goal of cryptography (and therefore of quantum cryptography) is to hide private information from untrusted malicious agents. While symmetric cryptography offers unconditional security (e.g. one-time pad), it is impractical for everyday applications as it requires a pre-shared key, which cannot be re-used, and is of the size of a message.<\/p>\n

Asymmetric public-key systems such as RSA offer practical key management, as the key size is smaller than that of a message, but are based on unproven mathematical conjectures, providing only limited security. Indeed, as most of today\u2019s security is based on the hardness assumption of prime number factoring (and the related order finding problem), the advent of efficient quantum Shor\u2019s algorithm compromised virtually the entire classical cryptography.<\/p>\n

While quantum cryptography was shown to be, at least for the case of key distribution, unconditionally secure, and subsequently both experimentally realised and introduced into today\u2019s technology, many advocated the so-called \u2018post-quantum cryptography\u2019 \u2013 classical cryptography based on even harder mathematical conjectures \u2013 in the hope that future computers (both classical and quantum) will not be able to break them.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, such approaches have important negative drawbacks, which ultimately favour quantum cryptography. Namely:<\/p>\n