NIST’s Third PQC Standardization Conference, one of the major events in NIST’s PQC Standardization process, has started today (Monday) and will be running from June 7th to June 9th this year. Due to COVID, it is being held virtually.
InfoSec Global is an active contributor in the conference and our Principal Cryptographic Technologist, Vladimir Soukharev, will be in attendance. Specifically, ISG is part of the SIKE submission and SPHINCS+ submission which are both currently in Round 3.
About Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE)
Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) is an elliptic curve isogeny-based key agreement scheme. Isogenies can also be referred to as Post-Quantum Elliptic Curve Cryptography. They have the smallest key sizes among all the candidates. SIKE updates will be presented by Luca DeFeo on Tuesday June 8th. SPHINCS+ is a stateless hash-based digital signature scheme, whose security only relies on the underlying hash function. SPHINCS+ is presented by Andreas Hülsing on Monday, June 7th (today).
We are now into the third conference as the standardization process, which was announced in 2016, is well underway and approaching finalization. Similarly, quantum threats are getting much closer to becoming a reality either in the near future or today if we consider harvest now, decrypt later attacks.
Thus, PQC standardized schemes are essential to provide quantum-resistant protection for today's, as well as future, computers and devices.
