The quest for practical cryptographic primitives that are robust against quantum computers is of vital importance for the field of cryptography. Among the abundance of different cryptographic primitives one may consider, one-way functions stand out as fundamental building blocks of more complex cryptographic protocols, and they play a central role in modern asymmetric cryptography. We propose a mathematical one-way function, which relies on coarse-grained boson sampling. The evaluation and the inversion of the function are discussed in the context of classical and quantum computers. The present results suggest that the scope and power of boson sampling may go beyond the proof of quantum supremacy, and pave the way towards cryptographic applications.
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