Collision Finding with Many Classical or Quantum Processors
Stacey Jeffery · Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) · 2011
I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii In this thesis, we investigate the cost of finding collisions in a black-box function, a problem that is of fundamental importance in cryptanalysis. Inspired by the excellent performance of the heuristic rho method of collision finding, we define several new models of complexity that take into account the cost of moving information across a large space, and lay the groundwork for studying the performance of classical and quantum algorithms in these models. iii Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to my supervisor, Dr. Michele Mosca, for introducing me to the subject of quantum information processing, and for the years of support and encouragement