Hacking Cryptographic Protocols with Advanced Variational Quantum Attacks

TL;DR

This paper presents an advanced variational quantum attack method that efficiently compromises cryptographic protocols using fewer qubits, demonstrating significant improvements over previous quantum attack approaches and highlighting vulnerabilities in classical cryptography to quantum threats.

Contribution

Introduces an improved variational quantum attack algorithm that reduces qubit requirements and enhances attack success rates on cryptographic protocols, including symmetric and asymmetric schemes.

Findings

Successfully simulated attacks on symmetric ciphers like S-DES, S-AES, and Blowfish.

Achieved 24 times fewer iterations than brute-force for a Blowfish key.

Demonstrated potential for quantum attacks on large classical cryptographic systems.

Abstract

Here we introduce an improved approach to Variational Quantum Attack Algorithms (VQAA) on crytographic protocols. Our methods provide robust quantum attacks to well-known cryptographic algorithms, more efficiently and with remarkably fewer qubits than previous approaches. We implement simulations of our attacks for symmetric-key protocols such as S-DES, S-AES and Blowfish. For instance, we show how our attack allows a classical simulation of a small 8-qubit quantum computer to find the secret key of one 32-bit Blowfish instance with 24 times fewer number of iterations than a brute-force attack. Our work also shows improvements in attack success rates for lightweight ciphers such as S-DES and S-AES. Further applications beyond symmetric-key cryptography are also discussed, including asymmetric-key protocols and hash functions. In addition, we also comment on potential future improvements of our methods. Our results bring one step closer assessing the vulnerability of large-size classical cryptographic protocols with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices, and set the stage for future research in quantum cybersecurity.