NIST Selects 14 Candidate ‘Backup’ Algorithms for Digital Signature Encryption
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has selected a group of candidate digital signature encryption algorithms, some of which might one day serve as additional post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards.
As part of its continuing effort to secure digital information against the threat of future quantum computers, NIST is developing additional defenses that can serve as backups to the three PQC standards it published in August and the one it plans to release in draft form later this year.
Of these four standards, three are intended for use with digital signature encryption. Two of these three are based on a mathematical approach known as structured lattices, while the third, which is based on hash functions, operates too slowly to work well for some applications. To guard against the possibility that a vulnerability might be discovered with lattices, NIST would like a backup signature scheme that does not rely on structured lattices, but that also performs better than the hash-based standard.
To this end, NIST has selected a group of 14 candidate digital signature algorithms from a larger group of 40 eligible submissions it received after requesting candidate algorithms from the public in July 2022. NIST details the 14 algorithms and its selection process in its Status Report on the First Round of the Additional Digital Signature Schemes for the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process (NISTIR 8528). The agency invites the public to consider these 14 algorithms during an evaluation period that will last at least a year. Another round of evaluation is likely, and NIST does not anticipate announcing which of these algorithms, if any, will be standardized until at least 2027.
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