In a seminal talk [Kit02], Kitaev presented the lower bound analysis for the task of two-party strong coin flipping using a magical semidefinite program (SDP) which established a non-zero bias on its best case security. Following this, much of the security analysis in modern day quantum cryptography relies on SDP formulations. In our work, we introduce and use the novel framework of stochastic semidefinite programming (sSDP) to develop first quantum protocols for tasks such as Rabin oblivious transfer. We also demonstrate the use of sSDP to combine insecure protocols resulting into one with a decent security.
Speaker's Bio
Akshay Bansal is a final year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Virginia Tech advised by Jamie Sikora, with a research focus on quantum algorithms, learning theory, and convex optimization.
He holds a bachelors in Chemical Engineering from IIT Kanpur and masters in Computer Science from ISI Kolkata. He has previously worked at the Center of Quantum Technologies in Singapore, and held research position at IISc Bengaluru.
His current work delves into the mathematical foundations of quantum cryptography, classical and quantum machine learning, and convex analysis.