ISSN (Print) : 0974-6846

Indian Journal of Science and Technology, Vol 10(3), DOI: 10.17485/ijst/2017/v10i3/110635, January 2017 ISSN (Online) : 0974-5645

Quantum Cryptography: A Review

Seema S. Kute1 and Chitra G. Desai2
1
Department of CS and IT, Dr. B.A.M.U., Aurangabad–431004, Maharashtra, India; [email protected]
2
Department of Computer Science, NDA, Khadakwasla, Pune–411023, Maharashtra, India; [email protected]

Abstract
Background/Objectives: The preferment from conventional computing to quantum computing has created new
­challenges­in­the­field­of­cryptography.­The­cryptographic­algorithms­which­ensured­intractability­in­conventional­comput-
ing­surfaces­serious­challenge­in­quantum­computing.­Methods/Statistical Analysis:­By­applying­the­quantum­mechanics­
quantum­cryptography­can­be­used­to­unrestrictedly­for­reliable­data­communications.­Findings:­The­cryptography­cur-
rently­ in­ use,­ known­ as­ conventional­ cryptography,­ depends­ absolutely­ on­ the­ hardness­ of­ the­ mathematical­ concepts.­
Elliptical­curve­cryptography­today­known­as­modern­cryptography­is­used­extensively­for­securing­financial­transactions.­
Advances­in­quantum­computing,­can­easily­break­this­security­by­reverse­computing­keys­faster­than­the­conventional­
­computers.­Application/Improvements:­This­paper­is­an­attempt­to­review­fundamentals­of­quantum­cryptography­to­as­
to­­represent­it­in­easiest­possible­way­for­a­novice­demonstrating­quantum­onetime­pad.

Keywords:­Conventional­Cryptography,­Density­Matrix,­Quantum­Cryptography,­Quantum­One­Time­Pad

1. Introduction known as modern cryptography is being used extensively

for securing financial transactions. Advances in quantum
Cryptography is the study of methods of sending mes- computing, can easily break this security by reverse com-
sages in secretes form so that only the intended recipient is puting keys faster than the conventional computers2-5,7.
able to read the message after applying a specific key. The Assume that Alice and Bob are communicating
process of converting the message into some disguised through an insecure communication channel with best
form is called Encryption. The plain text is converted of the conventional cryptography algorithm for encryp-
into cipher text by using some key called as Encryption tion and decryption which is almost intractable for any
key. At the receiver’s end, the recovering of plaintext from conventional computing system. Now, suppose, there is
cipher text is required. The process of converting the mes- Eve who is an intruder is constantly listening to the com-
sage into its original form is called Decryption. Keys play munication channel through which Alice and Bob send
important role in cryptography. The classification of the and receive message and has powerful quantum comput-
cryptographic algorithms is basically on the type of key ing resources. Suppose Alice and Bob are using factoring
used. There are two types of keys-Symmetric (secrete key) based algorithm then even can make use of quantum
and asymmetric (public key)1,6,8,22,23. algorithm for factoring14. The other applications are
In secret key cryptography, both the sender and quantum key distribution17. Quantum digital signatures
receiver share a common key which is kept secret. The are another application15. These and many more signify
same key is used for encryption as well as decryption. the need of quantum cryptography.
Hence, it is also called as Symmetric Key Cryptography. In
asymmetric key cryptography, two distinct keys are used.
2. Literature Review
The limitations of symmetric key cryptography,
particularly, key distribution was the reason that the asym- At the beginning of the twentieth century, 1917, the well-
metric cryptography started gaining the importance over known One Time Pad (OTP) encryption was introduced
the time period. Eventually, elliptical curve cryptography by Verman20. To ensure security OTP demands a very

*Author for correspondence

 Quantum Cryptography: A Review

long key, a key as long as the plain text. Practically it is cryptography is achievable over shorter distance. In the
very difficult to deal with long keys from implementa- next section we discuss the concept of quantum encryp-
tion perspective. In 1940, the seminal paper of Shannon15 tion with the help of quantum one time pad.
changed the way to look at cryptography. He put forth a
very fundamental idea of Information Theoretic Security
i.e., the cipher text should not reveal the information 3. Classical and Qubits
about the plain text. Cryptography was thereafter viewed
3.1 Classical Bits
as more applied stream of mathematics and information
theory. Since then several cryptographic algorithms were The classical information is represented using classical
proposed. To make OTP practical the stream ciphers were bits i.e. 0 and 1. Classical cryptography works on classi-
introduced. The basic idea behind stream ciphers was to cal bits. Quantum cryptography works on quantum bits
pseudorandom key instead of random key. Stream cipher also called as qubits. A qubit can be in a superposition
cannot be termed as perfectly secure because the key size between zero and one. Qubits are different from classical
is small. As we know from OTP that for being perfectly bits for e.g. they cannot be copied.
secure the key length must be greater than or equal to The reason that the quantum cryptography needs to
the message being encrypted. Thus the security of the be dealt separately from the classical cryptography is that
stream cipher lies with the pseudorandom generator the information represented in both is different.
which needs to hold the property of being unpredictable. Referring to the various sources of quantum cryptog-
Symmetric algorithms were being used mostly DES19 raphy as listed in references below, the next section is an
made its own place in the history. However, the limita- attempt to put forth essential of qubit.
tions of symmetric key gave birth to the concept of public
key cryptography9. 3.2 Qubits
These algorithms were based on integer factorization Before we see qubit, a special way to write vectors known
or discrete logarithms or elliptical curves and also efforts as “bra-ket” notation needs to be understood. Let be
were made to propose algorithms based on two hard the vector, then we write to denote a vector in
problems. The well-known example of integer factoriza- a two dimensional vector space. For example, the “ket” of
tion based algorithm is RSA10, proposed in 1978 based on vector is .
the concept of public key cryptography proposed by Diffie The bra of this vector is triangle transpose, T denotes
and Hellman9 in 1976. The strength of this algorithm the transpose.
motivated several researchers in the field of cryptography
to propose new cryptographic algorithms with RSA as the
(1)
basis. The example of discrete logarithm based cryptogra-
phy is the one proposed by Elgamal in 198511. * denotes the entry wise conjugate, and Thus a “ket”,
To attain high level security obligation, the key size of denoted is a d-dimensional column vector and the
the conventional public key cryptosystem has to be suf- “bra” is a d- dimensional row vector.
ficiently large, which in lower speed and consumption Let us write the classical bits as:
of more bandwidth. To overcome this problem the solu-
tion that came up was the elliptical curve cryptosystem.
Elliptical curve cryptosystem was discovered in 1985 by
Victor Miller and Neil Koblitz19.
3.2.1 Definition of a Qubit
Quantum cryptography was originated by Bennett
,Bassard and Wiesner13. Quantum coding was first intro- A state of a qubit can be represented as a 2-dimentional
duced by Wiesner15 in 1983. Then Bennet and et.al.17 ket vector , therefore
used quantum coding in conjunction with public key
(2)
cryptographic techniques to yield several schemes for
unforgeable subway tokens. Several others contributed where α and β and are the amplitudes. And,
to quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution.
Though quantum computing is not that feasible, quantum |α|2+ |β|2=1 (3)

2 Vol 10 (3) | January 2017 | www.indjst.org Indian Journal of Science and Technology
 Seema S. Kute and Chitra G. Desai

Inner product helps us to decide upon whether the Table 1. Representation of classical bits and Qubits24.
qubit is a valid qubit. 2 Classical Bits 2 Qubits (Quantum Bits)
(4) 00 α 00
01 β 01
10 μ 10
11 € 11
So this is a qubit.
For example, Let us consider a qubit
3.2.2 Density Matrix
Suppose is the number of qubits then, we define qubit as
a vector in a complex space of dimension . Practically
We have, we will deal with more than one qubit at a time and there-
fore it is not possible to work with qubits by representing
Let, & them into vectors. It is required that the vectors be rep-
resented as matrix. To describe the quantum system in a
Hence, =
mixed state we use density matrix24. The density matrix is
To check whether it is a valid qubit, we have denoted by (rho). The matrix ρ, associated to the state
Ψ can be computed by taking the ket of Ψ times the bra of
Ψ, which is just the outer product.
(7)
Thus, it is a valid qubit. The quantum states of a qubits
are given by: Consider, the mixed state with probability and
with probability .

Then,
, with
The state of one of many qubits is given by tensor and
product for example the state of two qubits (A & B) in
terms of a vector is,

(5) Thus, in this case

(6)

The joint state,

4. Classical One Time Pad

For example, the tensor product of In 1917, Gilbert Verman was invented the electrical One-
Time Pad for telegraph encryption23. Let M,K ,C be the
message, key and cipher space respectively. Where,
M = m1m2……mi is a message of length i bits. K=
k1k2…….ki, is of the exact length i and it constructs a
cipher text string C= c1c2…..ci... Let us consider that we
Table 1 shows the 2 classical bits and how they are rep- have single bit message and key . Therefore the
resented in 2 qubits24. encryption function is

Vol 10 (3) | January 2017 | www.indjst.org Indian Journal of Science and Technology 3
 Quantum Cryptography: A Review

(8)
And the decryption function is:
As we know that Eve knows nothing about the key .
(9) So the probability that is and is .
Therefore:
One time pad has perfect secrecy i.e., from the cipher
text we will not be able to obtain any information about the
encrypted plain text if we do not know the key. However
to obtain perfect secrecy, the key length must greater than
or equal to message length which is difficult for practical Considering the standard basis we get:
implementation. Also the key K must be used only once
and never used again (Figure 1).
The maximally mixed state which is independent
5. Quantum One Time Pad of the message . Therefore Eve cannot gain anything
about the message from it.
Using quantum one time pad16,18 we demonstrate here
how the qubit is encrypted. The following example dem-
onstrates quantum encryption scheme. Let Alice and Bob 6. Conclusion
send a qubit to Bob using the key . Quantum computing has changed the way the con-
Let Eve be an intruder who tries to listen the com- ventional systems use to function using classical bits.
munication between Alice and Bob but cannot learn Quantum systems use qubits which are very much dif-
anything about ferent in nature as compared to the classical bits. All
Before sending the message Alice performs conventional cryptographic algorithms turn futile in
some operation on that depends on key . Eve who front of quantum computing due to enormous speed at
knows nothing about the key sees some state . When which these algorithms operate. The present paper briefs
reaches Bob he applies some decryption function. Using the journey of cryptography from classical one time pad
the decryption function Bob applies transformation using to quantum cryptography. Then the difference between
the key to obtain the sate classical bits and qubits along with the representation is
Let us consider the classical bit m in terms of standard presented referring to the various sources in the refer-
basis as a quantum state i.e.: ences. Finally, the classical one time pad and quantum
(10) one time pad are demonstrated.

Computing x or is the same as applying bit flip opera-

tion, if and doing nothing when . Here is 7. References
the bit flip operation.
1. Sasirekha N, Hemalatha M, Quantum Cryptography
For decryption, Bob applies decryption function to using Quantum Key Distribution and its Applications,
obtain the message , therefore International Journal of Engineering and Advanced
(11) Technology (IJEAT). 2014 April; 33(4):2249−8958.
2. Rohit Kumar, Samudra Gupt Maurya, Ritika Chugh, Manoj
Further, the above vector is converted to vector into PV. Current Refuge Trends using Classical and Quantum
density matrix. Cryptography, Internatinal Journal of Computer Science
and Information Technologies. 2014; 5(3):2974−77.
3. Hiskett P, Hughes R, Lita E, Miller A, Nam S, Miller A,
Sender Receiver Nordholt J, Rosenberg D. Long-Distance Quantum Key
M: 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 C: 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 Distribution in Optical Fibre., New Journal of Physics.
K: 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 K: 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 2006.
C: 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 M: 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 4. Martinez-Mateo, Jesus, David Elkouss, Vicente Martin.
Key Reconciliation for High Performance Quantum Key
Figure 1. Example of 8 bit OTP. Distribution, Scientific reports. 2013; 3.

4 Vol 10 (3) | January 2017 | www.indjst.org Indian Journal of Science and Technology
 Seema S. Kute and Chitra G. Desai

5. Bennett CH. Quantum Cryptography using any Two 14. Shor PW. Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime
Non Orthogonal States, Physical Review Letters.1992; Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum
68(21):3121−24. Computer, SIAM J. Comp. 1997; 26:1484. See also quant-
6. Bennett CH, Brassard G, Crepeau C, Maurer UM. ph/9508027.
Generalized Privacy Amplification, IEEE Transactions on 15. Gottesman D. Chuang IL. Quantum Digital Signatures,
Information Theory. 1995; 41(6):1915–23. quant-ph/0105032.
7. Choi KS, Chou CW, Deng H, Felinto D, Kimble HJ, 16. Fernando GSL. Brandão and Jonathan Oppenheim,
Laurat J, Riedmatten H. Functional Quantum Nodes Quantum One-Time Pad in the Presence of an Eavesdropper,
for Entanglement Distribution Over Scalable Quantum Phys. Rev. Lett. Jan 2012.
Networks, Science. 2007; 316(5829):1316–20. 17. Bennett CH, Brassard G. Quantum Cryptography: Public Key
8. Rishi Dutt Sharma. Quantum Cryptography: A New Distribution and Coin Tossing, In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on
Approach to Information Security, International Journal Comp.,Sys. and Signal Process., Bangalore;1984. p. 175–79.
of Power System Operation and Energy Management 18. Shukla R, Prakash HO. Sampurna Suraksha: Unconditionality
(IJPSOEM). 2011; 1(1). Secure and Authenticated One Time Pad Cryptosystem,
9. Diffie Hellman. New Directions in Cryptography. IEEE IEEE Conference: International Conference on Machine
Transactions on Information Theory. 1976; 22:644−54. Intelligence and Research Advancement; 2013. p. 174−178.
10. Rivest RL, Shamir, Adleman L. A Method for Obtaining 19. Millar V. Use of Elliptic Curves in Cryptography, CRYPTO.
Digital Signatures and Public Key Cryptosystems, Commun. 1985; p. 417−26.
ACM. 1978; 21:120−26. 20. Menezes A, van Oorschot PC, Vanstone S., Handbook of
11. ElGamal T. A Public Key Cryptosystem and a Signature Applied Cryptography, Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press; 1996.
Scheme based on Discrete Logarithms, IEEE Trans. Inform. 21. http://homepage.univie.ac.at/reinhold.bertlmann/pdfs/
Theory. 1985 Jul; IT−31(4). T2_Skript_Ch_9corr.pdf.
12. Wiesner S. Conjugate Coding, Written Circa 1970 and 22. Henle F. BB84 Demo. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~henle/
Belatedly Published in Sigact News. 1983; 15(1). Quantum/cgi-bin/Q2.cgi (2002).
13. Bennett CH, Brassard G, Breidbart S, Wiesner S. Quantum 23. https://physicsandcake.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/qc_
Cryptography, or Unforgeable Subway Tokens, Advances for_beginners.pdf.
in Cryptology: Proceedings of Crypto 82, Santa Barbara, 24. http://www.qudev.ethz.ch/content/QSIT15/QSIT15_V03_
Plenum Press, (August 1982). slides.pdf.

Vol 10 (3) | January 2017 | www.indjst.org Indian Journal of Science and Technology 5