Quantum money and quantum weak coin flipping: unconditional security in the real world

18.11.2019 14:30

Mathieu Bozzio from the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, France, gives a talk on "Quantum money and quantum weak coin flipping: unconditional security in the real world".

In principle, harnessing the laws of quantum theory can drastically boost the security of modern communication networks, from public key encryption to electronic voting and online banking. Real-world implementation, however, opens a whole new spectrum of attacks and loopholes which must be characterized.

We provide an introduction to some very simple yet powerful attacks on photonic demonstrations of quantum-cryptographic tasks, and how to take them into account in security proofs. We then illustrate this with two quantum network tasks: quantum money and quantum weak coin flipping. The first exploits the no-cloning property of quantum physics to generate unforgeable tokens, banknotes, and credit cards, stored in a malicious quantum memory. The second is a fundamental cryptographic primitive, which allows two distant parties to flip a coin when they both desire opposite outcomes. Using quantum entanglement then prevents any party from biasing the outcome of the flip beyond a certain probability.

Organiser:
Host: Philip Walther
Location:
Schrödinger Room, 4th floor, Boltzmanngasse 5, 1090 Vienna