Applying Grover's Algorithm to Hash Functions: A Software Perspective

Abstract

Quantum software frameworks provide software engineers with the tools to study quantum algorithms as applied to practical problems. We implement classical hash functions MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, and SHA-3 as quantum oracles to study the computational resource requirements of conducting a preimage attack with Grover's algorithm. We introduce an improvement to the SHA-3 oracle that reduces the number of logical qubits required in the Keccak block permutation by 40%. The source code is available at https://github.com/rhpreston/grovers-hash-functions.

Keywords

• Cryptographic hash function
• quantum algorithm
• quantum computing
• quantum information science
• software engineering