Biography
Ramona Wolf is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck. Previously, she held a Junior Professorship at the University of Siegen and was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich with Renato Renner. Her research focuses on the security of quantum cryptographic protocols, in particular quantum key distribution and randomness generation, and their links to the foundations of quantum theory.
Abstract
Throughout history, cryptography has been caught in a vicious circle: Cryptographers keep inventing new methods to hide information, which in turn are broken by cryptanalysts, prompting cryptographers to devise even more sophisticated encryption methods, and so on. Quantum key distribution offers a way to break this circle by enabling information-theoretic secure encryption based (almost) solely on the laws of physics. Nonetheless, caution is still advised: Even these protocols can only break the vicious circle if they come with a complete security proof against all possible attacks. In this tutorial, I will introduce the principles underlying modern security proofs for QKD, including the assumptions on which they rely, discuss key techniques such as finite-key analysis, and survey recent advances to highlight both progress and remaining challenges.