Practical application of post-quantum cryptography

The development of quantum computers is a significant threat to the current cryptographic infrastructure, endangering the security of nearly every electronic device, as current public key encryption standards can be broken with a large enough quantum computer. This realization lead the United States standardization body to start a standardization effort of post-quantum cryptography (i.e. cryptography that is secure against quantum computers) in 2017. 

Recently, 4 encryption schemes were selected to proceed to the final round (including our design). However, there is still a long way to go from standardization to secure and efficient applicability of the new standard. An important open question is how to implement the standardization candidates securely, even in the advent of side-channel attacks (i.e. attacks that exploit physical properties of calculation such as power consumption). 

This project aims at providing secure and efficient implementation of post-quantum cryptography in real-world applications. The first step is to study and design protection mechanisms against side-channel attacks. Then work will continue on encryption for application specific targets, especially in resource-constraint environments. This work anticipates a push towards more efficient application specific designs after a generic standard is selected. Finally, we will research applicability of our results in other areas of cryptography.