Constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Post-Quantum Cryptography, PQCrypto 2008, held in Cincinnati, OH, USA, in October 2008. This book contains the papers that present four families of public key cryptosystems that have the potential to resist quantum computers.
Threedecadesagopublic-keycryptosystemsmadea revolutionarybreakthrough in cryptography. They have developed into an indispensable part of our m- ern communication system. In practical applications RSA, DSA, ECDSA, and similar public key cryptosystems are commonly used. Their security depends on assumptions about the di culty of certain problems in number theory, such as the Integer Prime Factorization Problem or the Discrete Logarithm Problem. However, in 1994 Peter Shor showed that quantum computers could break any public-key cryptosystembased on these hard number theory problems. This means that if a reasonably powerful quantum computer could be built, it would put essentially all modern communication into peril. In 2001, Isaac Chuang and NeilGershenfeldimplemented Shorsalgorithmona7-qubitquantumcomputer. In 2007 a 16-qubit quantum computer was demonstrated by a start-up company with the prediction that a 512-qubit or even a 1024-qubit quantum computer would become available in 2008. Some physicists predicted that within the next 10 to 20 years quantum computers will be built that are su ciently powerful to implement Shors ideas and to break all existing public key schemes. Thus we need to look ahead to a future of quantum computers, and we need to prepare the cryptographic world for that future.
