Generating hard Ising instances with planted solutions using post-quantum cryptographic protocols

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel method to generate hard instances with planted solutions based on the public–private McEliece post-quantum cryptographic protocol. Unlike other planting methods rooted in the infinite-size statistical analysis, our cryptographic protocol generates instances which are all hard (in cryptographic terms), with the hardness tuned by the size of the private key, and with a guaranteed unique ground state. More importantly, because of the private–public key protocol, planted solutions cannot be easily recovered by a direct inspection of the planted instances without the knowledge of the private key used to generate them, therefore making our protocol suitable to test and evaluate quantum devices without the risk of “backdoors” being exploited.