PQShield is pleased to announce its contributions to the highly anticipated US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) draft standards for Quantum-Safe cryptography announced today.
Our team has worked alongside leaders from the global cryptography community over the past year to help refine the finalist algorithms NIST announced last year in preparation for the eventual standardisation that has now been announced.
Post-Quantum Cryptography schemes co-designed by PQShield have been included, following security, implementation and performance analyses by NIST. It’s been a pleasure to work on this monumental project which marks an important step in the transition to a quantum secure future.
The draft standards have now been published by NIST for public review and can be found below:
- Module-Lattice-based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism Standard (ML-KEM) derived from CRYSTALS-Kyber | FIPS 203 (Draft)
- Module-Lattice-based Digital Signature Standard (ML-DSA) derived from CRYSTALS-Dilithium | FIPS 204 (Draft)
- Stateless Hash-Based Digital Signature Standard (SLH-DSA) derived from SPHINCS+ | FIPS 205 (Draft)
A fourth scheme derived from Falcon will be published soon.
Businesses that are preparing to modernise their cryptography can now use NIST standards as a reliable benchmark when taking inventory of their cryptographic systems and assessing their vulnerability to the quantum threat. More importantly, those businesses that have already conducted these audits and can now begin to implement their roadmaps to quantum security.
To deliver rapid feedback on these new draft standards, PQShield and the UK National Cyber Security Centre are sponsoring the 2nd Oxford Post-Quantum Cryptography Summit at Oxford University in September, which will convene leading experts from academia and industry, for a four day event at Oxford University’s Institute of Mathematics. We’re looking forward to hearing the first full round of feedback on these standards from the cryptographic community.
Building on PQShield’s partnership with leading industry innovators, the company is also announcing its Enterprise Software Access Program, which will allow eligible companies to access PQShield’s PQC Software solutions that incorporate the latest specifications released by NIST. Companies can pre-register their interest here.
The updated software will be available in September, free to use for a period of time for non-commercial purposes and will include:
- PQCryptoLib – A fully portable cryptographic library with a C/C++ interface of FIPS 140-3-ready, post-quantum (PQC) and classical cryptographic algorithms.
- PQCryptoLib Micro – This is a highly-optimised version of PQCryptoLib, specifically designed for memory-constrained platforms like microcontrollers.
- PQSDK – provides easy-to-use software implementations of both post-quantum and classical cryptographic primitives, including an integration of PQShield’s PQCryptoLib library with popular high-level cryptography libraries like OpenSSL and mbedTLS.