NIST Issues New Quantum Crypto Standards for Cyberspace – EEJournal
NIST, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, has finally published a trio of new standards for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) in an attempt to get ahead of the coming cryptography crisis that’s forecast for the time when quantum computers get powerful enough to crack current RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) public-key encryption standards. Although the RSA algorithm was published in 1977 and predates the Internet by a decade or so, today’s Internet services, including the Secure Shell (SSH), OpenPGP, S/MIME, and SSL/TLS protocols, rely on RSA for encryption and digital signature functions. Other public-key crypto standards, including the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and elliptic key cryptography, are…