We congratulate Dr. Lars Schlieper on the successful defense of his dissertation “Quantum Cryptanalysis with Minimal Amount of Qubits” and thus on his completed doctoral degree. Schlieper was supervised by Prof. Alexander May and Prof. Gregor Leander within the Cluster of Excellence CASA – Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries. The disputation took place on Friday, August 12, 2022.

Three quick questions for the newly graduated doctor:

In simple terms, what did you explore in your thesis?

In short, I studied the impact of emerging quantum computers on existing cryptography.
In particular, I have explored theoretically and experimentally how limited resources, such as the number of qubits in emerging quantum computers, can be used more efficiently.

With what motivation did you approach the topic?

It is often estimated that quantum computers will be capable of executing today’s theoretical algorithms in about 50 years.
My motivation was to show the earlier potential danger posed by quantum computers.

What unanswered questions arise from your research?

Moving further, one question that now arises, for example, is how the theoretical results can be efficiently implemented in practice. Another open question is how larger quantum computers behave in reality, since only computers with 15 qubits were available for the experiments.