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Answer to thorny question could unlock internet security
From TechXplore:
...
The question—known as the "NP versus P" problem—is the deepest fundamental problem in computer science and cryptography, lying at the heart of whether any internet data can ever be truly private.
In the unlikely event that P = NP, all encryption schemes and methods of keeping our data on the internet private would be insecure. But even if P is not equal to NP, and even if someone manages to prove this, we still don't know how to get an encryption scheme that is truly secure.
...
Their work is detailed in "On the Possibility of Basing Cryptography on EXP ≠ BPP," which won the Best Paper award at CRYPTO '21 and will be presented at the conference Aug. 17.
The question posed in the title of the paper deals with the idea of randomness, a thorny computer science and math question. The EXP versus BPP problem—while not as famous as "NP versus P"– is another longstanding open problem, and cause for even more embarrassment in the field, according to Pass.
more ...
The full paper (in pdf) is here.