Lamport Signatures for a Post-Quantum Computing World

Towards a More Trusted Quantum Computing World

Remember the time there was the “Intel Inside” logo on computers, well, quite soon, there may be stickers that advertise “Post-quantum robust”. These stickers will identify that the software used will not be broken by the advent of quantum computers. Like it or not, all of our existing signatures on our blockchains will be broken and along with most of our digital signed software, thus applications such as Corda and IOTA are planning for a post-quantum world, while many others are just sleep walking into a world of broken trust.

Introduction

Public key methods provide us with ways of both authenticating the sender, and the integrity of the method. Unfortunately most of the methods which are used to create these signatures, such as with prime number factorization (as with RSA) and in elliptic curve methods, will be cracked with quantum computers. This article outlines some of the hash-based signature methods which could be used as a basis for hash-based signatures.

Many of the problems we see on the Internet relate to the lack of trust within transactions. The emails you receive and the Web sites that you visit often have very little trust built into them. For trust we examine the email address…