Hardware assisted post-quantum cryptography for embedded system devices

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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.