For a Post-Quantum World, Is It All About Lattice Methods? No! Meet SPHINCS+, BIKE, and HQC
Do you remember those who finish second? In future years, will anyone remember France in the World Cup in 2022 or that Matthew ‘Mack’ Robinson finished 4/10 of a second behind Jesse Owens? And, for the AES standard, do you remember that Ross Anderson’s Serpent symmetric key method ran Rijndael close for the AES standard and that BLAKE nearly beat Keccak for the SHA-3 standard?
But, in cybersecurity, being second to a winner is not a bad thing, as we need to be sure we have alternatives to the winner — just in case the winner falls in another race. So, let’s meet the 2nd placers in PQC (Post Quantum Cryptography).
NIST PQC: The Winner Takes It All?
And, so, NIST defined that CRYSTALS-KYBER (key-establishment) and CRYSTALS-Dilithium (Digital Signatures), and that FALCON and SPHINCS+ will also become standards for Digital Signatures. Why? Well, in Digital Signatures, on my assessment, Dilithium 2 (128-bit security) scored 28 points out of 30 for its all-round performance [here]:
