U.K. Conference Accelerates Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards Review Process

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Global crypto experts gathered in Oxford to put NIST's draft standards under the microscope.

www.eetimes.eu/, Dec. 29, 2023 – 

Industry readiness for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) took an important step forward in late summer when the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published three quantum-safe draft standards for public review. The University of Oxford's Mathematical Institute recently hosted the second Oxford Post Quantum Cryptography Summit to review and provide timely feedback on the published draft standards.

EE Times Europe spoke with three post-quantum cryptography experts at the conference to gain insight into the new standards and their potential impact on the development of embedded systems.

NIST's draft standards, covering quantum-secure public key encryption and digital signature algorithms, are FIPS 203 (Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism Standard), FIPS 204 (Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard) and FIPS 205 (Stateless Hash-Based Digital Signature Standard). More than 100 people from the international cryptographic community, representing the foremost post-quantum cryptography experts from universities, technology organizations and governments worldwide, attended the Oxford conference. Through a series of conference streams and workshops, delegates looked closely at the proposed standards with the aim of accelerating the standardization process through a collaborative technical review.

Adopting Arm Cortex-M4 as a PQC reference platform

While much work has gone into offering up post-quantum algorithm candidates and the four selection rounds, embedded developers may wonder whether the proposed options will be suitable for running on resource-constrained microcontrollers.

Peter Schwabe, research group leader of the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (Bochum, Germany), addressed this issue when speaking with EE Times Europe about his work on recent post-quantum security initiatives.

"I've been involved in the PQC process as a co-author of seven proposals, and of the four algorithms that have now been selected for standardization, I'm a co-author of three," Schwabe said. "I've also been conducting research within a project funded by the EU called EPOQUE, which stands for engineering post-quantum cryptography, of which there are two main parts: One is on protocol integration and the other on achieving an efficient and secure implementation on microcontrollers."

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