The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has chosen the first group of encryption tools that are based on structured lattices and hash functions, two families of math problems that are designed to withstand the assault of a future quantum computer, which could potentially crack the security used to protect privacy in the digital systems we rely on every day.
The four selected encryption algorithms will become part of NIST’s post-quantum cryptographic standard, expected to be finalized in about two years.
The announcement follows a six-year effort managed by NIST, which called upon the world’s cryptographers to devise and then vet encryption methods that could
