Avinatan Hassidim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
One of the problems in classical security is that information can be copied: passwords can be stolen, songs can be pirated, and when you email an attachment, you still have the original. One implication is that E-commerce requires communicating with a server (e.g. the credit card company or PayPal) whenever one makes a transaction. One could hope that the no-cloning theorem would help circumvent this and enable a physical quantum state to function like money. Such money could be used in transactions both in person and on a future “Quantum Internet,” not requiring contact with a central authority.
In the talk I will survey some recent progress on quantum money. I will present an impossibility result for a certain family of schemes, and a scheme which is based on ideas from knot theory.