Cryptography in a Quantum World

People rely on cryptographic tools every day to provide information security objectives like privacy (e.g. to protect your bank account and credit card details) and authentication (e.g. to be sure your web browser is communicating with your actual bank when doing online banking). Most of these tools rely on the presumed computational hardness of certain mathematical problems, like finding the prime factors of a large integer.

Quamtum physics fundamentally changes the rules of the game for storing and manipulating information.

The ability to build technologies that harness quantum physics would have a huge impact on cryptography, rendering certain widely used cryptographic tools obsolete, and also offering fundamentally new ones. I will discuss the impact of quantum information processing on information security.

For Dr. Mosca's biography go to http://cisac.ucalgary.ca/news-events