PQ News

Team PQShield is out in force at the Second NIST PQC Standardization Conference in Santa Barbara this week. We have an unprecedented 4 separate presentations!

Dr Thomas Prest – Falcon – An update (Fri 23rd at 9am CA time).

This talk is an update about Falcon, a signature scheme co-submitted by PQShield as a post-quantum standard candidate. Among the the 9 remaining candidates, Falcon is the most compact, one of the fastest and is also the only one which can be converted easily into an identity-based encryption scheme. The presentation also showcases recent additions to Falcon, such as a new faster, constant-time and portable implementation.

Dr Thomas Prest – Simple, Fast and Constant-Time Gaussian Sampling over the Integers for Falcon (Fri 23rd 10:35am CA time).

Gaussian sampling over the integers is an essential building block of Falcon. Performing it in constant time is important for the practical security of the scheme, but doing so efficiently has evaded researchers for several years. This paper (presented by co-author Melissa Rossi) shows how to achieve this in a manner which is simple to implement, fast and portable across several platforms.

Dr James Howe – Optimised Lattice-Based Key Encapsulation in Hardware (Sat 24th 10:50am CA time)

This research proposes optimised designs for FrodoKEM, concentrating on high throughput, by paralleling its matrix multiplication operations. This process is allowed by the use of a much smaller and faster PRNG. Additionally, we propose a first-order masking scheme for decapsulation.

Dr Markku-Juhani Saarinen – Round5 – An update (Sat, August 24th at 3pm CA time)

Markku will be presenting an update on the Round5 PQC semifinalist public-key encryption algorithm that he co-designed in the second NIST PQC Workshop held in UC Santa Barbara. But the presentation also contains clues to some newer developments that he is currently working on at PQShield: Security controllers, RISC-V, and PQC hardware acceleration.

Want to know more? then please get in touch