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No. I think that is the exact point he was making that quantum key distribution is orthogonal to post-quantum cryptography and that the consensus is that poat-quantum cryptography will actually be used while quantum key distribution is basically an academic exercise because it doesn't have practical utility for the problem it is attempting to solve.


I am confused. How is "security that does not depend on any 'difficulty' conjectures / information theoretically perfect" not of practical utility?


The so called quantum key-exchange requires a shared secret, so it is actually doing key-expansion. Besides that it has practical problems in side-channel protection and cannot achieve a high enough bandwidth to be of interest in most practical settings.


If you wanted to toss out public key cryptography as insecure, I guess you could use QKE to make symmetric key cryptography more practical. You would have a secure method of communicating your keys, and wouldn't have to worry that your new post-quantum public key cryptography was broken- since symmetric cryptography just isn't vulnerable in the same way.


Edit: Deleted an incorrect comment. This is a good description of what I am missing: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/2719/is-quantum-k... (man in the middle attacks)




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