Applying Grover's Algorithm to Hash Functions: A Software Perspective
This work addresses the practical application of quantum algorithms for cryptanalysis, but it is incremental as it focuses on software implementation improvements.
The paper tackled the problem of implementing classical hash functions as quantum oracles to analyze the resource requirements for preimage attacks using Grover's Algorithm, resulting in a 40% reduction in logical qubits for the SHA-3 oracle.
Quantum software frameworks provide software engineers with the tools to study quantum algorithms as applied to practical problems. We implement classical hash functions MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, and SHA-3 as quantum oracles to study the computational resource requirements of conducting a preimage attack with Grover's Algorithm. We introduce an improvement to the SHA-3 oracle that reduces the number of logical qubits required in the Keccak block permutation by 40%.