Post-Quantum Cryptography: From Theoretical Foundations to Practical Deployments

Dear Colleagues,

There is a major vulnerability at the heart of the digital world. Existing public-key encryption schemes, such as key-exchange protocols used by TLS/HTTPS connections, RSA/ECDSA signatures used by certification authorities, and transactions used by cryptocurrencies, among others, are all vulnerable to quantum cryptanalysis. Indeed, the majority of such encryption systems rely on the difficulty of integer factorization or discrete logarithm problems that can be solved by a quantum computer in polynomial time. Therefore, there is a critical need to develop, analyze, and implement new encryption pillars to secure the future of electronic systems. Post-quantum cryptography seeks such cryptographic solutions. The ongoing NIST’s post-quantum encryption standardization process calls an urgent effort in all aspects of realizing these systems. Theoretical security of post-quantum systems should be evaluated both in the quantum and classical case, higher-level protocols based on these encryptions should be developed, hardware/software efficiency and implementation security of their unique arithmetic structures should be analyzed on a multitude of platforms, and, at the same time, mistakes of prior public-key encryption standards should be avoided while foreseeing potential difficulties for transitioning to a new one.  Given the space of existing proposals, there is also a need for a fair, comprehensive, and comparative analysis of potential solutions. This special edition targets all these aspects. We invite submissions from cryptographers, cryptographic engineers, standardization bodies, and developers working with existing standards.

Prof. Dr. Aydin Aysu
Guest Editor

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• Post-quantum cryptography
• Quantum and classical cryptanalysis
• Higher-level protocols using post-quantum encryption
• Hardware and software acceleration
• Implementation attacks: fault attacks and side-channel analysis
• Cryptographic standardization challenges