Photo by mohammad alizade on Unsplash

Day 0 for the Building of a New World of Trust

Well, after so many years, it is nearly here …

It is part of NIST’s standardization process for PQC, and which has been running since 2016:

For Public-Key Encryption and KEMs (Key Exchange) we have:

• Classic McEliece. This has been around for around 40 years, and has been shown to be fairly resistant to attack. It produces a fairly long encryption key, but produces a fairly small amount of ciphertext.
• CRYSTALS-KYBER (Lattice). Uses LWE (Learning with Errors) with lattice methods. A new lattice attack was discovered within the period of the assessment, but it is hoped that an updated version of KYBER can be produced for the final assessment. NIST have some worried about its side-channel robustness, and is a strong contender for KEM.
• NTRU (Lattice). This is a traditional structured lattice based approach, and has been around for longer than the other lattice methods — showing that it is perhaps more robust against attack and against…