An Overview of Quantum Cryptography

                            Andrew C. Yao
                         Princeton University

 In recent years, there has been much interest in the possible use of
quantum mechanical effects to perform computational tasks that are
hard by classical means.  Research efforts can be broken down into two
broad categories: "quantum computation" and "quantum cryptography".
The former is concerned with constructing quantum computers to solve
currently time-consuming computations such as factoring large
integers, while the latter is aimed at designing communication
protocols, with the use of quantum signals, to achieve cryptographic
goals.  This talk will be focused on the latter subject.  We will
introduce the basic principles of quantum cryptography, and review the
theoretical and experimental results that have been obtained.  No
previous knowledge of quantum computation will be assumed.