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Meet Frodo … And The Magic of the Post Quantum Ring
Towards Post Quantum Public Key Encryption and Key Exchange
Well, who knows when quantum computers will be built at scale, but one thing that is for sure, is that they will break the fundamental core of security on the Internet. With this our existing public key encryption, digital signature and key exchange methods will be a severe risk. And so we must find alternatives, and one of these is FrodoKEM — and which is a NIST final round contender for key exchange (replacing ECDH) and public key encryption (replacing ECC and RSA). I like the Frodo method, as it’s a pure learning with errors method.
It is based on the learning with errors problem, and has a number of levels: FrodoKEM-640 (Level 1, equivalent in security to AES-128), FrodoKEM-976 (Level 3, equivalent in security to AES-192), and FrodoKEM-1344 (Level 5, equivalent in security to AES-256). There are two main variants of these for FrodoKEM-X-AES and FrodoKEM-X-SHAKE. The -AES version has hardware acceleration for AES, and can run faster on processors that support hardware acceleration for AES, while the -SHAKE version is faster on systems that do not support this.
With Frodo, the steps to generate a key, encrypt a message, and decrypt are:
