Cryptography for the Post-Quantum Era

Cryptographic schemes can provide technical measures to guarantee long-term data protection, since they ensure the data’s confidentiality, integrity and authenticity as long as the secret key material stays secret. However, the schemes used in practice today are threatened by quantum computers. Powerful quantum computers would be capable of breaking essentially all asymmetric cryptographic schemes (public-key encryption, key encapsulation, and digital signatures). Consequently, the security of long-term storage of confidential data (“data at rest”) ensured by using public-key encryption would be compromised. Similarly, protocols for securely transmitting data (“data in transit”) using key encapsulation methods to ensure confidentiality and digital signatures to ensure authenticity of data and the communicating parties would be compromised as well.

To mitigate this attack scenario and to prepare for a switch to quantum-resistant cryptography, the project ROUTE analyzes the state of the art of cryptographic schemes that are based on quantum-resistant problems – classified as post-quantum cryptography – which are not threatened by powerful quantum computers and will provide recommendations for the deployment of post-quantum secure schemes.

Therefore, ROUTE will match the recommendations with the requirements of the usage scenarios “data at rest” and “data in transit” and their security properties. To achieve that, ROUTE evaluates the schemes based on (1) the security analysis of the underlying hardness assumptions and of the concrete constructions, (2) their efficiency which is being evaluated empirically, and (3) quality and security of the available implementations.

The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Regions and Tourism (BMLRT) within the security research funding programme KIRAS.

Facts:

• Project start: October 2020
• Project duration: 12 months
• Project costs: approximately 100.000 EUR
• Funding: KIRAS