Two quantum Ising algorithms for the shortest-vector problem

Abstract

Quantum computers are expected to break today's public key cryptography within a few decades. New cryptosystems are being designed and standardized for the postquantum era, and a significant proportion of these rely on the hardness of problems like the shortest-vector problem to a quantum adversary. In this paper we describe two variants of a quantum Ising algorithm to solve this problem. One variant is spatially efficient, requiring only O ( N log 2 N ) qubits, where N is the lattice dimension, while the other variant is more robust to noise. Analysis of the algorithms' performance on a quantum annealer and in numerical simulations shows that the more qubit-efficient variant will outperform in the long run, while the other variant is more suitable for near-term implementation.