WalnutDSA Presented at NIST’s First PQC Standardization Conference

On April 11, NIST held their first Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Standardization Conference, an important milestone in the project and the effort to find and standardize quantum-resistant security solutions. More about this project and SecureRF’s involvement can be found here.

The workshop brought together presenters of more than 60 submitted solutions to NIST’s call for quantum-resistant, public-key cryptography algorithms. Our CTO, Derek Atkins, attended to present SecureRF’s WalnutDSA. His presentation is posted on the NIST site and can be found here.

The project now moves into a phase for analysis of the submitted solutions which is expected to last for 3-5 years. Our submission (WalnutDSA) received a lot of attention and analysis from several respected researchers in the six months leading up to this conference. We are happy to report that our team demonstrated that all of these analyses/attacks were exponential in nature and required only parameter changes to address them and maintain the security of WalnutDSA.  You can find a summary of the analyses/attacks and our responses here.

The next PQC Standardization Conference is expected to be held in August of 2019.