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Building For A Secure Future … Goodbye ECC and Hello To SABER, Kyber, NTRU or McEliece … or even SIKE!

The foundation of cybersecurity is CIA … Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. At the core of this is the creation of secure and authenticated encryption tunnels, and a founding element of this is key exchange.

For most of our current implementations … such as the secure connection you are making to this Web page … we use ECDH (Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman). But, wait! Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) methods can be cracked with quantum computers. And so we will have to wean ourselves off ECDH and look elsewhere.

Luckily, NIST has been assessing the contenders for a standard method, and they are McEliece, SABER, NTRU and Kyber. I have implemented the methods here:

• SABER: here. It is a lattice method with Learning with Rounding (LWR).
• Kyber: here. it is a lattice method with LWE (Learning with Errors).
• NTRU (TRU (Nth degree TRUncated polynomial ring): here. It is a lattice method.
• McEliece: here. This uses error-correcting codes with errors.