“If someone discovers an ingenious algorithm for rapidly solving the hardest NP problems, the bedrock will crumble, and the whole tower will collapse.”
Researchers built cryptographic primitives from quantum physics instead of classical hard math problems, which means they could survive even if someone cracks NP-hard problems. The key insight is “one-way puzzles” that generate keys which don’t unlock their own locks but still enable useful cryptographic protocols. They tied the whole framework to the matrix permanent problem, a notoriously hard computation. This is genuinely interesting theoretical work, though the gap between “mathematically elegant quantum cryptography” and “something you can actually deploy” remains vast.