Meet The New Kids on the Crypto Signing Block

As a cryptography researcher, there’s always something new and shiny coming along, and every day I wake up to a new problem, a new solution, or a new issue. But, there’s one BIG PROBLEM … all of our existing public key methods that we use on the Internet will be cracked by quantum computers. This includes the cracking of our key exchange method (typically ECDH) and of our digital signature methods (typically RSA, ECDSA and EdDSA). For this, NIST standardised the post-quantum cryptography method of Kyber for key exchange/public key encryption and Dilithium, Falcon and SPHINCS+ for digital signatures.

So, now NIST has opened up a new competition, which will look to find alternatives to these Dilithium, Falcon and SPHINCS+, and especially open up new methods for standardisation (as lattice methods have been used for most of the existing standards). These are [here]:

• Multivariate Signatures (10): 3WISE, DME-Sign, HPPC (Hidden Product of Polynomial Composition), MAYO, PROV (PRovable unbalanced Oil and Vinegar), QR-UOV, SNOVA, TUOV (Triangular Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar), UOV (Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar), and VOX.
• MPC-in-the-Head Signatures (7): Biscuit, MIRA, MiRitH (MinRank in the Head), MQOM (MQ on my Mind), PERK, RYDE, and SDitH (Syndrome Decoding in the Head).
• Lattice-based Signatures (6)…