Introduction (original) (raw)

Here's the one-minute introduction: "Imagine that it's fifteen years from now. Somebody announces that he's built a large quantum computer. RSA is dead. DSA is dead. Elliptic curves, hyperelliptic curves, class groups, whatever, dead, dead, dead. So users are going to run around screaming and say 'Oh my God, what do we do?' Well, we still have secret-key cryptography, and we still have some public-key systems. There's hash trees. There's NTRU. There's McEliece. There's multivariate-quadratic systems. But we need more experience with these. We need algorithms. We need paddings, like OAEP. We need protocols. We need software, working software for these systems. We need speedups. We need to know what kind of key sizes to use. So come to PQCrypto and figure these things out_before_ somebody builds a quantum computer."

For a twenty-minute introduction, read the following paper: Daniel J. Bernstein. "Introduction to post-quantum cryptography."http://www.springer.com/math/numbers/book/978-3-540-88701-0?detailsPage=samplePages [PDF mirror]This paper is the introductory chapter of the following book: Daniel J. Bernstein, Johannes Buchmann, Erik Dahmen (editors).Post-quantum cryptography. Springer, Berlin, 2009. ISBN 978-3-540-88701-0.

For much more information, read the rest of the book! There are five detailed chapters surveying the state of the art in quantum computing, hash-based cryptography, code-based cryptography, lattice-based cryptography, and multivariate-quadratic-equations cryptography. The book has a 2009 publication date but was already available in November 2008 from booksellers such as Amazon.

For earlier analyses of the impact of quantum computers on cryptography, see the following papers:

• Hong Zhu. "Survey of computational assumptions used in cryptography broken or not by Shor's algorithm." Master's thesis. 2001.http://crypto.cs.mcgill.ca/~crepeau/PDF/memoire-hong.pdf.
• Marco A. Barreno. "The future of cryptography under quantum computers." Senior thesis. 2002.http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sws/theses/marco.pdf.
• Michael S. Brown. "Classical cryptosystems in a quantum setting." Master's thesis. 2004.http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0404061.
• Johannes Buchmann, Carlos Coronado, Martin Doering, Daniela Engelbert, Christoph Ludwig, Raphael Overbeck, Arthur Schmidt, Ulrich Vollmer, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann. "Post-quantum signatures." 2004.http://itslab.csce.kyushu-u.ac.jp/iwap04/PostQuantumSignatures.pdf. See also this site's separate lists of papers onhash-based cryptography,code-based cryptography,lattice-based cryptography, andmultivariate-quadratic-equations cryptography.

Survey talks

The following presentations are available online:

• PQCrypto 2008: Daniel J. Bernstein's invited talk "A brief survey of post-quantum cryptography"(PDF slides).
• INDOCRYPT 2008: Tanja Lange's invited talk "Post-quantum cryptography"(PDF slides).

Challenges for cryptanalysts

• Cryptanalytic challenges for wild McEliece
• TU Darmstadt Lattice Challenge
• SVP Challenge
• Ideal Lattice Challenge
• Fukuoka MQ Challenge

About this site

pqcrypto.org was founded by Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange. Bernstein added the bibliography. Pierre-Louis Cayrel and Christiane Peters contributed many references and URLs.

Version

This is version 2019.04.09 of the index.html web page.