Abstract
The discovery of quantum algorithms that may have an impact on cryptography is one of the main reasons of the rise of quantum computing. Currently, all quantum cryptanalysis techniques are purely theoretical and none of them can be executed on existing or near-term quantum devices. So, this paper investigates the capability of already existing quantum computers to attack a toy block cipher (namely the Heys cipher) using the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). Starting from a known-plaintext key recovery problem, we transform it into an instance of the MAX-SAT problem. Then, we propose two ways to implement it in a QAOA circuit and we try to solve it using publicly available IBM Q Experience quantum computers. The results suggest that the limited number of qubits requires the use of exponential algorithms to achieve the transformation of our problem into a MAX-SAT instance and, despite encouraging simulation results, that the corresponding quantum circuit is too deep to work on nowadays (too-)noisy gate-based quantum computers.
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Notes
- 1.
A sbox (substitution box) is an algorithm component that compute a substitution in a cipher.
References
Ibm q experience. https://quantum-computing.ibm.com
Qiskit source code. https://github.com/QISKit/
Sympy source code. https://github.com/sympy
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Phab, L., Louise, S., Sirdey, R. (2022). A First Attempt at Cryptanalyzing a (Toy) Block Cipher by Means of QAOA. In: Groen, D., de Mulatier, C., Paszynski, M., Krzhizhanovskaya, V.V., Dongarra, J.J., Sloot, P.M.A. (eds) Computational Science – ICCS 2022. ICCS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13353. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08760-8_19
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