Paper 2019/1374

A Survey of Digital Signing in the Post Quantum Era

Teik Guan Tan and Jianying Zhou

Abstract

Public key cryptography is threatened by the advent of quantum computers. Using Shor's algorithm on a large-enough quantum computer, an attacker could cryptanalyze any RSA/ECDSA public key, and generate fake digital signatures in seconds. If this vulnerability is left unaddressed, all electronic communications can potentially be without the assurance of user authenticity and data non-repudiation. In this paper, we profile all 9 digital signature candidate algorithms within NIST's post-quantum cryptography contest round 2 as well as the NIST's interim standards on stateful hash-based signatures, and evaluate their suitability against 11 different industry applications. Through a scoring framework that we proposed where the application requirements are compared against the algorithm capabilities, we have found that Falcon, a lattice-based digital signing algorithm can best meet all of the application requirements if improvements in key generation and key sizes are achieved.