Are you and your data ready for the post-quantum world?

The post-quantum world is coming

Over the past three decades, the family of public-key cryptosystems, a fundamental breakthrough in modern cryptography in  the late 1970s, have become an increasingly integral part of our communication networks.   The Internet, as well as other communication systems, rely principally on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, RSA encryption, and digital signatures using DSA, ECDSA, or related algorithms. The security of these cryptosystems depend on the difficulty of certain number theoretic problems such as Integer Factorization or the Discrete Log Problem.  In 1994, Peter Shor showed that quantum computers can solve each of these problems in polynomial time, thus rendering the security of all cryptosystems based on such assumptions impotent.

A large international community has emerged to address this issue in the hope that our public key infrastructure remain intact by utilizing new primitives.  In the academic world, this new science  bears the moniker Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC).

In  August 2015, the National Security Agency published a webpage announcing preliminary plans for transitioning to quantum resistant algorithms. In  December of  2016,  the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced a call for proposals for quantum resistant algorithms with a deadline of the 30th of November, 2017.   In light of the threat that quantum computers pose to cryptosystems such as RSA and ECC,  the need to develop and deploy quantum-resistant technologies, particularly post-quantum cryptosystems, is becoming a reality, and a central topic in information security in the coming years. Due to the long process to deploy such a system and the concern for forward security, businesses need to think ahead and prepare for such a reality.

The development of post-quantum cryptography is expected to help  build secure and efficient alternatives for the post-quantum computer world.