Hacking Cryptographic Protocols with Advanced Variational Quantum Attacks

Borja Aizpurua

doi:10.1145/3718349

Hacking Cryptographic Protocols with Advanced Variational Quantum Attacks

2025-02-18

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Josu Etxezarreta Martínez

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Román Orús

DOI：10.1145/3718349

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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.

Keywords:

Quantum computing

cryptanalysis

variational quantum algorithms

quantum machine learning

symmetric-key cryptography

quantum cybersecurity

quantum cryptography

hybrid quantum-classical computing

quantum variational circuits

Hacking Cryptographic Protocols with Advanced Variational Quantum Attacks

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