Toffoli-depth reduction method preserving in-place quantum circuits and its application to SHA3-256

When implementing a quantum circuit for a desired reversible function, an attempt is made to design an accurate quantum circuit. Then, the quantum circuit is optimized based on a specific cost function, such as design cost, width (the number of qubits), depth, etc. In particular, if an in-place subcircuit itself can be optimized while maintaining its in-place property, it will be a very useful way to increase efficiency without changing the initial architecture of the entire quantum circuit. Furthermore, since its (clean) work qubits can easily be utilized in subsequent subroutines of the quantum circuit, it has an additional important advantage in terms of width. In this paper, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, we present a global Toffoli-depth reduction methodology for an in-place version reversible circuit in the case that the given input circuit is optimized with Toffoli-count. We mainly introduce a process to optimize the \(\chi \) $\chi$ internal function block in SHA3-256 to explain our Toffoli-depth reduction approach preserving the in-place property, and hence, well-balanced five \(\chi \) $\chi$ quantum circuits are induced in terms of its width and T-depth. And then, we apply these five \(\chi \) $\chi$ circuits to design the entire SHA3-256 cryptosystem. One of the proposed SHA3-256 quantum circuits has a width of 1600 and a T-depth of 264, and this shows a result of 50% and 38.9% reduction compared to the previous circuit in terms of width and T-depth, respectively. Other versions of our SHA3-256 circuits just required 10–33 qubits per one T-depth compared to the previous results which require over 1800 qubits per T-depth, and so this means that our SHA3-256 circuits are well-balanced. Finally, we constructed Grover’s algorithm circuit using each version that realized SHA3-256. When output circuits for the presented method were used, quantum volume values of Grover’s algorithm circuits became 33 and 50 \(\%\) $\%$ of the value when the input circuit was used.