Quantum solutions to possible challenges of Blockchain technology
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Technological advancements of Blockchain and other Distributed Ledger Techniques (DLTs) promise to provide significant advantages to applications seeking transparency, redundancy, and accountability. Actual adoption of these emerging technologies requires incorporating cost-effective, fast, QoS-enabled, secure, and scalable design. With the recent advent of quantum computing, the security of current blockchain cryptosystems can be compromised to a greater extent. Quantum algorithms like Shor's large integer factorization algorithm and Grover's unstructured database search algorithm can provide exponential and quadratic speedup, respectively, in contrast to their classical counterpart. This can put threats on both public-key cryptosystems and hash functions, which necessarily demands to migrate from classical cryptography to quantum-secure cryptography. Moreover, the computational latency of blockchain platforms causes slow transaction speed, so quantum computing principles might provide significant speedup and scalability in transaction processing and accelerating the mining process. For such purpose, this article first studies current and future classical state-of-the-art blockchain scalability and security primitives. The relevant quantum-safe blockchain cryptosystem initiatives which have been taken by Bitcoin, Ethereum, Corda, etc. are stated and compared with respect to key sizes, hash length, execution time, computational overhead, and energy efficiency. Post Quantum Cryptographic algorithms like Code-based, Lattice-based, Multivariate-based, and other schemes are not well suited for classical blockchain technology due to several disadvantages in practical implementation. Decryption latency, massive consumption of computational resources, and increased key size are few challenges that can hinder blockchain performance.
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