A Quantum-classical Hybrid Architecture for Security Algorithms Acceleration

Since the discovery of Shor´s algorithm, the anxiety about quantum computation has increased. A large amount of research has been conducted to discover new algorithms and to build a quantum computer. But it seems that a general purpose quantum computer is far from being achieved. Meanwhile, cryptographers around the world started to look for security algorithms that resist to quantum attacks, but these still need improvement to achieve practical execution time. This work proposes a quantum-classical hybrid architecture, focusing on photonic quantum computers. A small quantum coprocessor implementing the Grover search algorithm is used to perform the search for roots of polynomials in F_pq. This coprocessor is used to accelerate the decoding process of the McEliece cryptosystem.