Sustainability of Public Key Cryptosystem in Quantum Computing Paradigm

Abstract

With the emergence of technological revolution to host services over Internet, secure communication over World Wide Web becomes critical. Cryptographic protocols are being in practice to secure the data transmission over network. Researchers use complex mathematical problem, number theory, prime numbers etc. to develop such cryptographic protocols. RSA and Diffie Hellman public key crypto systems have proven to be secure due to the difficulty of factoring the product of two large primes or computing discrete logarithms respectively. With the advent of quantum computers a new paradigm shift on public key cryptography may be on horizon. Since superposition of the qubits and entanglement behavior exhibited by quantum computers could hold the potential to render most modern encryption useless. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the implications of quantum computing power on current public key cryptosystems and to show how these cryptosystems can be restructured to sustain in the new computing paradigm.