The US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued the first three encryption algorithms developed to resist and negate attacks made by quantum computers against digital security defences, including those deployed in communications network infrastructure.
For years it has been known that malign actors have been accessing and stealing massive amounts of encrypted data, storing it and waiting for the arrival of a quantum computer that would be able to decrypt everything they have purloined, as well as then planning to use quantum computers to breach the security systems used to defend digital systems.
Now, though, there are some globally-applicable specifications that can be used to set up quantum-safe systems. The NIST announcement comes nine years after it began to select, evaluate, test and work on tools designed to standardise post-quantum encryption systems. The new algorithms are able fully to secure a very wide range of digital data transmissions, from email messages to e-commerce transactions and everything else between and beyond.
