Abstract:

Recent years have seen the application of evolutionary and other nature-inspired search approaches to achieve human-competitive results in cryptography and cryptanalysis. We have also seen the emergence of quantum computation as a tremendously exciting computational paradigm with significant potential applications in these areas. To date there seems to have been no synergistic application of these techniques in these fields. All applications are geared to the effective exploitation of one computational paradigm or another. Nature-inspired search and quantum computing can, however, be combined to achieve results neither is capable of individually. All that is needed is that classical search get 'close enough' for quantum search to take over and solve the residual problem. This observation has significant implications for the security of crypto-systems and our understanding of the power and usefulness of nature-inspired and quantum search.