Comment by jasperry
2 days ago
This is about the foundations of symmetric encryption. The authors are looking for constructions that give similar security guarantees to one-way functions if you live in the quantum world, and one-way functions are the theoretical foundation of symmetric cryptography.
Public-key encryption is based on trapdoor functions, which is a strictly stronger definition. So they wouldn't have got that far yet.
Well that sounds theoretically interesting, is there a practical application here? As far as i know traditional hash functions are just as safe in the quantum world as in the classical world (up to a sqrt for grover)
That's also what I heard about traditional one-way hash functions and quantum. It's a theoretical result for now...