IntroductionHere's the one-minute introduction: "Imagine that it's fifteen years from now. Somebody announces that he's built a large quantum computer. RSA is dead. DSA is dead. Elliptic curves, hyperelliptic curves, class groups, whatever, dead, dead, dead. So users are going to run around screaming and say 'Oh my God, what do we do?' Well, we still have secret-key cryptography, and we still have some public-key systems. There's hash trees. There's NTRU. There's McEliece. There's multivariate-quadratic systems. But we need more experience with these. We need algorithms. We need paddings, like OAEP. We need protocols. We need software, working software for these systems. We need speedups. We need to know what kind of key sizes to use. So come to PQCrypto and figure these things out before somebody builds a quantum computer."
For a twenty-minute introduction, read the following paper: Daniel J. Bernstein. "Introduction to post-quantum cryptography." http://www.springer.com/math/numbers/book/978-3-540-88701-0?detailsPage=samplePages [PDF mirror] This paper is the introductory chapter of the following book: Daniel J. Bernstein, Johannes Buchmann, Erik Dahmen (editors). Post-quantum cryptography. Springer, Berlin, 2009. ISBN 978-3-540-88701-0.
For much more information, read the rest of the book! There are five detailed chapters surveying the state of the art in quantum computing, hash-based cryptography, code-based cryptography, lattice-based cryptography, and multivariate-quadratic-equations cryptography. The book has a 2009 publication date but was already available in November 2008 from booksellers such as Amazon.
For earlier analyses of the impact of quantum computers on cryptography, see the following papers:
ConferencesNew conference series devoted to post-quantum cryptography:
Survey talksThe following presentations are available online:
About this sitepqcrypto.org was founded by Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange. Bernstein added the bibliography. Pierre-Louis Cayrel and Christiane Peters contributed many references and URLs.
VersionThis is version 2014.10.03 of the index.html web page.