Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.

NIST to Standardize Encryption Algorithms That Can Resist Attack by Quantum Computers

September 19th, 2023 / in Uncategorized / by Maddy Hunter

Last year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) set out to create four new algorithms capable of withstanding an attack by quantum computers. Last month, NIST released draft standards for three new algorithms, with a fourth planned to be released in about a year.

  • CRYSTALS-Kyber, designed for general encryption purposes such as creating secure websites, is covered in FIPS 203.
  • CRYSTALS-Dilithium, designed to protect the digital signatures we use when signing documents remotely, is covered in FIPS 204.
  • SPHINCS+, also designed for digital signatures, is covered in FIPS 205.
  • FALCON, also designed for digital signatures, is slated to receive its own draft FIPS in 2024.

This has been the part of a multi-year effort, starting in 2016 when the agency called on the world’s cryptographic experts to submit candidate algorithms to NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Project. NIST then released the 69 candidate algorithms for experts to analyze, and to crack if they could. This process was open and transparent, and many of the world’s best cryptographers participated in multiple rounds of evaluation, which reduced the number of candidates.

This effort comes at an imperative time with the rise and advancements of quantum computing and its potential capabilities to obliterate current cybersecurity standards. Currently encryption acts as an imperative security technique, using public-key encryption techniques (math problems a conventional computer cannot readily solve) to protect sensitive online data and transfers. While still being developed, quantum computing has the potential to solve these problems resulting in mass security breaches.

You can read the full announcement on the NIST website here.

A 2018 Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Workshop report “Next Steps in Quantum Computing: Computer Science’s Role” highlighted the major need and effort underway to find “post-quantum” public-key cryptosystems that could resist a quantum attack. As a continuation, in May 2023 the CCC held a workshop “5 Year Update to the Next Steps in Quantum Computing Workshop“.  The workshop focused on discussing the following topics:

1) Technologies and Architectures with a View Towards Scaling,

2) Applications and Algorithms,

3) Fault Tolerance and Error Mitigation,

4) Hybrid Quantum-Classical Systems: Architectures, Resource Management, and Security, and

5) Tools and Programming Languages.

Be on the lookout for a report in the coming months.

Disclaimer: Posts on this blog report on happenings, opportunities, and issues that arise in the broad computing research community, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the CCC or the National Science Foundation.


Related posts:

  1. Scientists Make Breakthrough in Developing Powerful Quantum Computers
  2. CCC Workshop Report Released: Identifying Research Challenges in Post Quantum Cryptography Migration and Cryptographic Agility
  3. White House Releases National Security Memorandum on Promoting United States Leadership in Quantum Computing While Mitigating Risks to Vulnerable Cryptographic Systems
  4. A Workshop on Quantum Information Science
  5. Microsoft Research Podcast on Quantum Computing
NIST to Standardize Encryption Algorithms That Can Resist Attack by Quantum Computers

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