Alessio Di Santo
Alessio Di Santo received a Bachelor's degree in Information Engineering in 2020 from the Università degli Studi dell'Aquila, with a thesis focused on fairness and cryptography. In 2022, he completed a Master's degree at the same institution, presenting a thesis on forensic acquisition techniques for Windows IT/OT assets. Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. at the Università degli Studi dell'Aquila under the supervision of Professor Dajana Cassioli, with co-tutor Walter Tiberti. Since 2020, he has been employed in the cybersecurity sector, working as a Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst, Incident Responder, Purple Teamer and Malware Analyst. Nowadays, he works as a Senior Cyber Security Specialist at Deutsche Boerse.
Session
What do Niccolò Machiavelli and Grover's Algorithm have in common? More than you think. While one mastered the art of political manipulation in the 1500s, the other promises a quadratic speedup for quantum key search. But when these two worlds collide, something unexpected happens: The quantum oracle misfires.
In this talk, we build Grover search oracles directly from Renaissance Italian texts —
Il Principe, Orlando Furioso, Il Cortegiano, I Ricordi — and measure exactly how much
linguistic redundancy contracts the cipher key space. We then simulate those oracles on a real quantum statevector and watch the standard iteration formula get it catastrophically wrong.
We will dive into:
- The Corpus-Driven Oracle: How character-level n-gram redundancy defines the fraction of "good" keys p_good — the sole parameter governing both classical exhaustive search and Grover oracle call count.
- The Discrete Resonance Failure: At one statistical threshold, the textbook formula predicts 2 optimal iterations. The real quantum simulation needs 24 — making quantum search four times slower than classical at that point. We dissect why.
- The L=600 Transition Zone: An empirical anomaly where stylistic variance in 16th-century prose (Latin citations, proper-noun lists) creates a chaotic instability band that separates statistical noise from structural reality.
- QUBO vs. Grover: Why compressing a 23-letter alphabet to 7 letters breaks the annealer but leaves the quantum oracle unaffected — and what that tells us about attack-surface geometry.
Join us for a journey where orthography meets qubits, proving that whether you hold a quill or a
quantum processor, redundancy is the enemy of secrecy — but discrete arithmetic is the enemy
of quantum speedup.