The PQ Blog

A Highly Anticipated Moment: a New Era is Here!

5th July 2022, London, UK: The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today announced the outcome of its post-quantum cryptography standardization project.

The new draft standards are all schemes contributed to by the advisory board and researchers at PQShield, who also advised on all other algorithms developed as part of the NIST standardisation process. Specifically:

• PQShield’s Dr Thomas Prest led and co-authored Falcon, a digital signature algorithm;
• PQShield’s Oussama Danba co-authored NTRU, a key encapsulation mechanism also shortlisted as a finalist;
• PQShield advisory board members Professor Peter Schwabe (Radboud University and the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy) and Professor Chris Peikert (University of Michigan) co-authored the finalists and alternates CRYSTALS-Dilithium, NTRU, SPHINCS+, Classic McEliece, CRYSTALS-KYBER, and FrodoKEM.

Of these, CRYSTALS-KYBER was today chosen by NIST as the new standard for public-key encryption/KEMs. Falcon, CRYSTALS-Dilithium and SPHINCS+ will all be standardized for digital signatures.

Read more in our NIST special newsletter here.