In a worldwide competition, the U.S. federal agency National Institute of Standards and Technology is looking for encryption methods for a technology that doesn't even exist yet: quantum computers, the super-fast and extremely powerful computers. If they exist one day, they will have to be protected in the same way as conventional computers. This is the aim of the competition. It is already in its second round. Of the original 69 entries, only 26 are still in the running. Researchers from the RUB Cluster of Excellence "Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Attackers", in short Casa, are involved in eight of them.
The Casa researchers are working in two or more groups simultaneously for the competition, since the new standardizations relate to signature methods on the one hand and encryption methods on the other. In most applications, both are needed for secure communication.
Has Google already done it?
Media reports show how urgently both procedures are apparently needed. According to information that has not yet been adequately confirmed, the U.S. company Google recently succeeded in achieving quantum superiority in an experiment. This means that a computer has achieved a level of computing power that a classical computer cannot manage. The quantum computer could therefore no longer be as far away as previously assumed.
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