Quantum Key Distribution Summer School at the Institute for Quantum Computing

What is Quantum Key Distribution?

The purpose of the Quantum Key Distribution summer school is twofold:

1. To provide a well-structured series of lectures explaining the level of modern know-how in quantum cryptography.
2. To provides better understanding of the topic by using the lecture material in interactive tutorials.

IQC has an excellent atmosphere for research, and just being here would innovate quantum leaps to the future. This summer school really built a solid foundation for understanding concepts of quantum information and cryptography.

Day 1

Basic cryptography

The first day at Quantum Key Distribution class is a considered a crash course on cryptography. Our first speaker is David Jao, he covers some basics of cryptography, such as the use of a single key for encrypting & decrypting. Basically this SKES symmetric key encryption scheme. He defining a protocol as semantically secure and infeasible to crack as 2⁸⁰ operations. Next major topic was hashing functions, and its application and weakness. It’s possible to create two files that have the same hash, and this is called a collision. This is not desirable as collision leads to a malicious hacker to change the content of the document and still pass it off as legitimate (he explained the birthday paradox). Hashing can also be used in conjunction with SKES and/or the use of public key cryptography to increase the speed of data delivery.
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