IYH Provocative Thesis:

Ignoring this = betting against cryptography’s unification.

Morimae, T.; Shirakawa, Y.; Yamakawa, T. From Worst-Case Hardness of NP to Quantum Cryptography via Quantum Indistinguishability Obfuscation. arXiv:2506.19542 [quant-ph] (2025).

If a fully-fledged quantum indistinguishability obfuscator (iO) can ever be built, the authors show it becomes a cryptographic Swiss-army knife. Under the lone extra assumption that NP problems stay hard for quantum computers on infinitely many input sizes, a spectrum of primitives eg one-way functions, quantum/classical public- and symmetric-key encryption, pseudorandom unitaries follow automatically.

This restructures the post-quantum research map: “get quantum iO → get almost everything else.”

Quantum iO + worst-case NP hardness = cryptographic singularity. If realized, it collapses NIST’s multi-primitive future into one master tool.