-------------------- New reading group: Entanglement and Cryptography. Summary ------------- When: Wednesdays 4-6pm. First class February 6th. Where: G531 What: Revolutionizing multiparty cryptography by harnessing basic quantum mechanics and special relativity Who: Interested graduate and advanced undergraduate students willing to put in a reasonable amount of reading and creative thinking effort. Instructor: Thomas Vidick (thomas.vidick(a)gmail.com) Details ---------- A number of very recent breakthroughs have demonstrated an expanding range of possibilities for the use of quantum mechanics in cryptography: - Classical testing of a quantum computer (or, how to puppeteer a quantum computation with classical hands): http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1209.0448. This will likely be the first paper we read (and maybe the one we spend most time on): get started early! - Device-independent key distribution (or, how to obtain secure implementation of two-party cryptography without any computational assumption): http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1209.0435, http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1210.1810 - Randomness certification (or, how to guarantee the house's shuffle): http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.3427 What is even more surprising is that security of protocols for these tasks can be guaranteed *without even relying on quantum mechanics*. Only some kind of causal isolation is required between the parties. The goals of the reading group will be, starting from the study of some of the papers linked to above (and others), to: 1) Understand the properties of quantum mechanics that make such tasks possible. These include entanglement, no-signaling correlations and the phenomenon of monogamy. 2) Find ideas for cryptographic tasks that can be solved by taking advantage of these properties. Initial suggestions include delegated computation, distributed computation, or other multiparty primitives, but I expect that we will find much more as we go along. The format: we will meet for two hours every Wednesday at 4pm. Each week one of the participants will present a paper, and we will discuss it. If there is interest a more focused group might form around pursuing research around some of the ideas that were presented, and will report to the reading group. We will try to have guest lectures by experts whenever available. Workload: this is an advanced reading group and will require a minimal amount of involvement (reading papers, coming up with questions, etc.). Most of the ideas discussed however will not require too much background, and anyone interested should be able to pick up the required facts on quantum computing and/or cryptography on the go. The reading group has a webpage where you will find an updated schedule and also notes for the lectures: people.csail.mit.edu/vidick/dicrypto_spring13.html There is also a mailing list for announcements, and anyone interested should sign up here: https://lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/dicrypto-reading _______________________________________________ qip mailing list qip(a)mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/qip