Preon: A New Candidate for Post-Quantum Cryptography #quantumcomputing #security #encryption

A few of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography competition finalists were cracked, so now there’s a new candidate! Preon is new on the scene ⬇️

NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Call for Proposals was launched in early 2017, so the standard has been worked on for years. It ensures that only the most effective, secure, and efficient technologies become standardized.

However, Post-Quantum Cryptography is HARD, and two candidate schemes were broken quickly after being announced. The chosen algorithms are then published as Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) or as NIST Special Publications (SP), providing detailed specifications and guidelines for implementation. So, the competition continues before standardization happens, probably by 2024.

Preon is a post-quantum signature scheme. It’s got some cool stuff going on:

🔑 Its keys are tiny! They are only tens of bytes for both secret and public keys,
⚡ Making these keys is fast
🛡️ It’s based on hashing which seems (so far) to stand up to quantum attacks (at best, Grover’s algorithm might weaken it slightly, but doubling key size would get over this vulnerability)
🔄 It’s built on a “zero-knowledge proof” system, which means it can do some interesting things like hiding specific details.

It’s also worth noting that Preon isn’t just coming from BTQ. They’ve teamed up with the brains at Hon Hai Research Institute, the research powerhouse behind global titan, Foxconn.

NIST is likely going to select multiple candidates, and there’s no proof none of them will be broken in the future. For many enterprises, it’s not even just the scheme to consider, but crypto-agility - being able to upgrade quickly if things bre