Black-Hole Radiation Decoding is Quantum Cryptography

TL;DR

This paper establishes a novel equivalence between the difficulty of decoding black-hole radiation and the existence of secure quantum cryptographic primitives, suggesting a physical basis for cryptography.

Contribution

It demonstrates an existential equivalence between black-hole radiation decoding hardness and various quantum cryptographic primitives, linking high-energy physics to cryptography.

Findings

Decoding black-hole radiation implies secure quantum cryptography.

Existence of cryptographic primitives is equivalent to black-hole decoding hardness.

Provides a physical justification for secure cryptography.

Abstract

We propose to study equivalence relations between phenomena in high-energy physics and the existence of standard cryptographic primitives, and show the first example where such an equivalence holds. A small number of prior works showed that high-energy phenomena can be explained by cryptographic hardness. Examples include using the existence of one-way functions to explain the hardness of decoding black-hole Hawking radiation (Harlow and Hayden 2013, Aaronson 2016), and using pseudorandom quantum states to explain the hardness of computing AdS/CFT dictionary (Bouland, Fefferman and Vazirani, 2020). In this work we show, for the former example of black-hole radiation decoding, that it also implies the existence of secure quantum cryptography. In fact, we show an existential equivalence between the hardness of black-hole radiation decoding and a variety of cryptographic primitives, including bit-commitment schemes and oblivious transfer protocols (using quantum communication). This can be viewed (with proper disclaimers, as we discuss) as providing a physical justification for the existence of secure cryptography. We conjecture that such connections may be found in other high-energy physics phenomena.