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Black-Hole Radiation Decoding is Quantum Cryptography

Authors:
Zvika Brakerski , Weizmann Institute of Science
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-38554-4_2 (login may be required)
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Presentation: Slides
Conference: CRYPTO 2023
Abstract: We propose to study equivalence relations between phenomena in high-energy physics and the existence of standard cryptographic primitives, and show the first example where such an equivalence holds. A small number of prior works showed that high-energy phenomena can be explained by cryptographic hardness. Examples include using the existence of one-way functions to explain the hardness of decoding black-hole Hawking radiation (Harlow and Hayden 2013, Aaronson 2016), and using pseudorandom quantum states to explain the hardness of computing AdS/CFT dictionary (Bouland, Fefferman and Vazirani, 2020). In this work we show, for the former example of black-hole radiation decoding, that it also implies the existence of secure quantum cryptography. In fact, we show an existential equivalence between the hardness of black-hole radiation decoding and a variety of cryptographic primitives, including bit-commitment schemes and oblivious transfer protocols (using quantum communication). This can be viewed (with proper disclaimers, as we discuss) as providing a physical justification for the existence of secure cryptography. We conjecture that such connections may be found in other high-energy physics phenomena.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{crypto-2023-33074,
  title={Black-Hole Radiation Decoding is Quantum Cryptography},
  publisher={Springer-Verlag},
  doi={10.1007/978-3-031-38554-4_2},
  author={Zvika Brakerski},
  year=2023
}