CROSSING Guest Talk: Prof. Marcin Pawłowski

Organizer: Jacqueline Brendel, CROSSING

Abstract

Device Independent (DI) cryptography claims to provide secure communication without any trust in the devices that the parties are using. It is a beautiful concept but hardly practical. Current experimental realizations are very slow and have limited range, which makes them useless in real-life applications. Moreover, there are no possibilities in sight that would change this in foreseeable future. One of possible solutions lies in Semi-DI cryptography, which makes some assumptions about the devices used. These can include a bound on the dimension of the Hilbert space of system communicated or trust in some of the devices used. However, such assumptions are very difficult to justify. In this presentation I propose two different DI protocols which have assumptions that are easy to justify in practice. These solutions combine security of full DI with the greater ease of implementation of Semi-DI.

Speaker Bio

Marcin Pawłowski obtained his PhD in physics at University of Gdańsk in 2010. Later he worked as a post-doc at University of Bristol from which he returned to Gdańsk in 2013 to start his own research group. Currently he is the head of Quantum Cybersecurity and Communication group at International Centre for Theory of Quantum Technologies.

He is an author of 70+ papers with h-index 28 and 2800+ citations (according to Google Scholar). The topics range from foundational experiments, through quantum cryptography to machine learning. His work focuses on simplification of quantum algorithms to make them more efficient and realizable with simpler experimental setups. He is also a founder of two startup companies: QCG – which delivers comprehensive cryptographic solutions, and SeQure Quantum – which builds device independent random number generators.