Under Starters Orders: It’s A Three Horse Race — Dilithium, Rainbow and Falcon … But Who Will Win The Cyber Stakes?

And so we see the rise of the quantum computer, and where our cybersecurity world will change in a disruptive way. At the core of cybersecurity is trust, and at the core of digital trust is the digital signature. This magical operation proves identity, it protects integrity and it defines (near) certainty. Presently, we are probably just at the start of our journey to make every transaction trustworthy, and so we need to understand how our existing methods can be made secure into the future.

Our existing methods for digital signing include DSA (/RSA), ECDSA and EdDSA. DSA uses RSA, and ECDSA and EdDSA use ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography). Within digital certificates, we typically still use RSA to provide a trustworthy digital signature, but in most other applications, such as with embedded device and blockchain, we use ECC methods. But the basic methods of implementing RSA and ECC are not hard problems in a quantum computer era, and so, with quantum computers, every Bitcoin wallet could be revealed, and every digital certificate could be cracked. If this happens, our existing Internet infrastructure will completely crash.

So, if your company uses trusted digital signatures, what’s the migration path? Well, just as with AES…