3 Key Takeaways from the recently announced NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards

The world relies on many protective measures today, even if it isn’t something you notice. Everything people interact with regularly, from cell phones and smart technology to websites, from payment transactions to city infrastructures, id secured by underpinning technology withsafeguards and checks. The ability of Quantum computers to break these safeguards quickly and easily is the key reason governments and regulatory bodies have been taking action for years to prepare new Quantum-safe algorithms that will update these safeguards to keep these ongoing protections. NIST, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, recently announced their first draft standards supporting the transition to a quantum secure cryptographic future. These new cryptographic algorithms will become part of the future regulations organizations must meet to be FIPS-compliant and Quantum-safe. Here are 3 key takeaways from this announcement:

1) The algorithms

The candidate algorithms popularly known by names chosen by their submitters will be assigned regulatory names by NIST — specifically:

Note that the announcement only contains 3 candidate algorithms today, with a promise to include a 4th digital signing algorithm in the not-too-distant future.

The current draft standards have made tweaks to the submitted algorithms and fixed/limited various parameters which means that any implementations based on the originally submitted reference algorithms will not be compatible with the new standards. This is “as expected” and follows a long-time pattern for NIST. It is also more likely that the public co

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