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Section: New Results

Quantum Information

Participants : Kaushik Chakraborty, André Chailloux, Anthony Leverrier, Jean-Pierre Tillich.

Quantum codes

Protecting quantum information from external noise is an issue of paramount importance for building a quantum computer. It also worthwhile to notice that all quantum error-correcting code schemes proposed up to now suffer from the very same problem that the first (classical) error-correcting codes had: there are constructions of good quantum codes, but for the best of them it is not known how to decode them in polynomial time.

Recent results:

Quantum cryptography

A recent approach to cryptography takes into account that all interactions occur in a physical world described by the laws of quantum physics. These laws put severe constraints on what an adversary can achieve, and allow for instance to design provably secure key distribution protocols. We study such protocols as well as more general cryptographic primitives such as coin flipping with security properties based on quantum theory.

Recent results:

Quantum correlations and nonlocality

Since the seminal work from Bell in the 60's, it has been known that classical correlations obtained via shared randomness cannot reproduce all the correlations obtained by measuring entangled quantum systems. This impossibility is for instance witnessed by the violation of a Bell inequality and is known under the name of “Quantum Nonlocality”. In addition to its numerous applications for quantum cryptography, the study of quantum nonlocality and quantum games has become a central topic in quantum information theory, with the hope of bringing new insights to our understanding of quantum theory.

Recent results:

Relativistic cryptography

(see Section  5.1.2 ).

Quantum cryptanalysis of symmetric primitives

Symmetric cryptography seems at first sight much less affected in the post-quantum world than asymmetric cryptography: its main known threat is Grover's algorithm, which allows for an exhaustive key search in the square root of the normal complexity. For this reason, it is usually believed that doubling key lengths suffices to maintain an equivalent security in the post-quantum world. However, a lot of work is certainly required in the field of symmetric cryptography in order to “quantize” the classical families of attacks in an optimized way. G. Leurent, A. Leverrier and M. Naya Plasencia have recently started working in this area in collaboration with M. Kaplan, especially on differential cryptanalysis. Some preliminary results show that counter-intuitive and surprising cases appear: in general, it is not sufficient to consider the best classical attacks and try to “quantize” them if one wants to find the best post-quantum attack [34] , [85] .