Quantum money from Brandt operators (Shahed Sharif, CSU San Marcos)

Public key quantum money is a replacement for paper money which has cryptographic guarantees against counterfeiting. We propose a new idea for public key quantum money. In the abstract sense, our bills are encoded as a joint eigenstate of a fixed system of commuting unitary operators. We show that the proposal is secure against black box attacks. In order to instantiate this protocol, one needs to find a cryptographically complicated system of computable, commuting, unitary operators. To fill this need, we propose using Brandt operators, which have a beautiful tripartite formulation. No prior knowledge of quantum computers is necessary for this talk! This is joint work with Daniel Kane and Alice Silverberg.