A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma

Neal Koblitz; Alfred J.  Menezes

Paper 2015/1018

A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma

Neal Koblitz and Alfred J. Menezes

Abstract

In August 2015 the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) released a major policy statement on the need for post-quantum cryptography (PQC). This announcement will be a great stimulus to the development, standardization, and commercialization of new quantumsafe algorithms. However, certain peculiarities in the wording and timing of the statement have puzzled many people and given rise to much speculation concerning the NSA, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), and quantum-safe cryptography. Our purpose is to attempt to evaluate some of the theories that have been proposed.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Public-key cryptography
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: NSA post-quantum cryptography elliptic curve cryptography NIST curves
Contact author(s): koblitz @ uw edu
History: 2018-05-20: last of 11 revisions; 2015-10-21: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2015/1018
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/1018,
      author = {Neal Koblitz and Alfred J.  Menezes},
      title = {A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2015/1018},
      year = {2015},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018}
}