We propose to study equivalence relations between phenomena in high-energy physics and the existence of standard cryptographic primitives, and show the first example where such an equivalence holds. A small number of prior works showed that high-energy phenomena can be explained by cryptographic hardness. Examples include using the existence of one-way functions to explain the hardness of decoding black-hole Hawking radiation (Harlow and Hayden 2013, Aaronson 2016), and using pseudorandom quantum states to explain the hardness of computing AdS/CFT dictionary (Bouland, Fefferman and Vazirani, 2020). In this work we show, for the former example of black-hole radiation decoding, that it also implies the existence of secure quantum cryptography. In fact, we show an existential equivalence between the hardness of black-hole radiation decoding and a variety of cryptographic primitives, including bit-commitment schemes and oblivious transfer protocols (using quantum communication). This can be viewed (with proper disclaimers, as we discuss) as providing a physical justification for the existence of secure cryptography. We conjecture that such connections may be found in other high-energy physics phenomena.

翻译：我们提出研究高能物理现象与标准密码原语存在性之间的等价关系，并展示了此类等价关系的首个实例。已有少量前期工作表明，高能现象可被密码学困难性所解释。例如：利用单向函数的存在性解释黑洞霍金辐射解码的困难性（Harlow and Hayden 2013, Aaronson 2016），以及利用伪随机量子态解释AdS/CFT对应词典计算的困难性（Bouland, Fefferman and Vazirani, 2020）。本工作表明，在前述黑洞辐射解码实例中，该困难性同时蕴含了安全量子密码学的存在性。事实上，我们证明了黑洞辐射解码困难性与多种密码原语（包括使用量子通信的比特承诺方案和不经意传输协议）之间的存在性等价关系。在适当限定条件下（后文将讨论），这可视为为安全密码学的存在性提供了物理论证。我们推测其他高能物理现象中也可能存在此类关联。