Security in Quantum Cryptography
It addresses the problem of secure communication for users needing information-theoretic security, but it is incremental as it reviews existing concepts.
The paper reviews quantum cryptography, which uses quantum physics to secure information transmission, ensuring confidentiality even over untrusted channels without relying on computational assumptions.
Quantum cryptography exploits principles of quantum physics for the secure processing of information. A prominent example is secure communication, i.e., the task of transmitting confidential messages from one location to another. The cryptographic requirement here is that the transmitted messages remain inaccessible to anyone other than the designated recipients, even if the communication channel is untrusted. In classical cryptography, this can usually only be guaranteed under computational hardness assumptions, e.g., that factoring large integers is infeasible. In contrast, the security of quantum cryptography relies entirely on the laws of quantum mechanics. Here we review this physical notion of security, focusing on quantum key distribution and secure communication.