The Start of The Blockchain Migration to Post-Quantum Robustness

Our finance industry is a core part of our critical national infrastructure. If there were to be any core weaknesses in it, it could cause serious weakness in our lives, and which could cause the national, international, or even worldwide, economy to crash.

Like it or not, all our existing public key methods that we use in production environments are will broken when quantum computers are made at scale. This means that RSA and ECIES will be broken for public key encryption, ECDSA, EdDSA and RSA will be broken for digital signatures, and ECDH will be broken for key exchange. Basically, the core of the security that we use on the Internet will collapse.

And what about the most trusted method of all: Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)? Well, with a blockchain, we take an entity’s private key and sign a message, and which is then proven against their public key. With this, the most common digital signature method is ECDSA, and the most common curve is secp256k1. If a blockchain can thus be broken, then cryptocurrency and other digital assets could then be stolen. We must, thus, look at ways to migrate from ECDSA towards a post-quantum robust method.

One core application area of DLT is with CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency), and where a central bank — such as the Bank of England —…