Abstract
In the late 1960’s a physicist, Stephen Wiesner, had the idea that the uncertainty principle could be used for cryptography (though he published his result much later [Wie83]). One of his ideas was that it would be possible to use a stream of polarized photons to transmit two messages in a way that would make only one of them readable at the receiver’s choosing. This notion, which he called “multiplexing”, is remarkably similar to the “one-out-of-two oblivious transfer” to be reinvented many years later [EGL83], and it even predates Rabin’s notion of oblivious transfer [Rab81] by more than a decade. In the late 1970’s, Wiesner’s invention was brought back to life by the work of Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard, which resulted in a CRYPTO ’82 paper [BBBW82]. Subsequently, Bennett and Brassard used quantum cryptographic principles to implement basic cryptographic protocols, such as secret key exchange and coin tossing by telephone [BB84]. There has been recently much excitement in the field of quantum cryptography because a working prototype of the quantum key exchange channel has been successfully built at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory, Yorktown Heights [BBBSS90].
Supported in part by Canada NSERC grant A4107.
Supported in part by NSERC Postgraduate and Postdoctorate Scholarships. This research was performed in part while the author was a graduate student at M.I.T. and while visiting the IBM Almaden Research Center.
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Brassard, G., Crépeau, C. (1991). Quantum Bit Commitment and Coin Tossing Protocols. In: Menezes, A.J., Vanstone, S.A. (eds) Advances in Cryptology-CRYPTO’ 90. CRYPTO 1990. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 537. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-38424-3_4
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