Hardware assisted post-quantum cryptography for embedded system devices

Public key cryptography (PKC) is fundamental to the security of digital communications. Existing PKC standards rely on the difficulty of factoring integers (RSA) or calculating discrete logarithms (Diffie-Hellman/Elliptic-Curves). However, these 'hard problems' are easily broken by emerging quantum computers, creating an imminent security threat. With quantum computers expected to become a commercial reality within the next 10-years, there is an urgent need for new quantum-resistant PKC standards.To reduce computational demand and to improve power efficiency and resilience to side-channel attacks, cryptography systems are frequently implemented with hardware assistance. Such hardware assisted cryptography is essential for (resource constrained) embedded system devices, in application areas such as smart/ID cards, mobile communications, transport, banking, Pay-Tv, IoT devices, wearables, Industry 4.0\.Whilst new 'post-quantum cryptography' schemes have been proposed that are difficult for quantum computers to solve; these utilise mathematical/algorithmic operations vastly different from existing RSA/EC standards for which little engineering tradition exists. Major classes of PQC are lattice-, code-, multivariate polynomial-, isogeny-, and hash-based algorithms.PQShield are mobilising a world-class team to address this challenge and have already achieved important breakthroughs for many PQC algorithm types, including two semi-finalist candidates at the NIST standardisation process of PQC.