quantum safe VPNs or communication tunneling
mechanisms. The arrangement has the advantage of
not requiring PQC migration for the myriad
applications and services utilized by an organization.
Early adoption is likely to mean that the solution is
pre-standards, so decisions will need to be made on
PQC algorithm selection and how future changes will
be enabled.
4.4 Industry and Standards
Involvement
Beyond internal considerations, an organization
should consider involvement in industrywide PQC
initiatives as key stakeholders. NIST, in its PQC
standardization initiative, has repeatedly invited the
broader industry to submit benchmark results,
application-based considerations, and protocol-based
requirements associated with PQC candidate
algorithms (Moody, 2019). Such information can
help to inform their decisions as they vet alternatives
and select parameters for standardization.
Organizations may similarly have a stake in other
standards that are emerging on the PQC landscape.
PQC hybrids in TLS 1.3, for example, are discussed
in a July 2019 Internet Draft from the IETF. Among
other issues, the group is considering design
alternatives for key share exchange between clients
and servers and how keys should be combined. Such
issues may have important implications for network
appliances and web server performance. As another
example, the OASIS open standards group has been
actively considering how quantum safety will be
integrated into the Key Management Interoperability
Protocol (KMIP) that is widely used by key
management servers (OASIS, 2019).
Many organizations make extensive use of open
source cryptography libraries and have a significant
stake in expediting and hardening PQC
implementations. The Open Quantum Safe (2021)
project has implemented, for example, a branch of the
widely used OpenSSL library that includes PQC for
TLS 1.3 (Crockett et al., 2019). This early library
effort can be used for testing and evaluating PQC in
organization prototypes. OQS authors invite open
source contributors to join them in implementing
PQC algorithms for various operating systems and
architectures (OQS, 2021).
4.5 Cryptographic Agility
A 2019 workshop sponsored by the CRA Computing
Community Consortium (2019) points out the need
for research on cryptographic agility, or the ability to
migrate cryptographic algorithms and standards in an
ongoing manner. While cryptographic libraries offer
modularized selection among algorithms or
standards, work is needed to extend the notion of
“agility” to include flexible frameworks for adjusting
cryptographic usage for different compliance
requirements, organizational policy changes, multiple
operating points on the security-performance tradeoff
spectrum, and more.
5 CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have considered the problem of
organizational readiness for new public key
cryptography standards (PQC) in response to the
threat of scaled quantum computing (QC). The
situation can broadly be described as “Y2Q”, or the
race between QC technology development and PQC
readiness (standards and deployment). We argue that
many factors (uncertain timeline, migration
complexity, the threat of harvest now, decrypt later)
imply the need for near term action and planning.
Organizations should put themselves on track early
for PQC readiness and develop a phased action plan,
working through cryptographic migration challenges
before threats and regulatory requirements escalate
the situation dramatically.
REFERENCES
Arute, F., Arya, K., Babbush, R. et al. (2019, October).
Quantum supremacy using a programmable
superconducting processor. Nature, vol 574, pp 505–
510.
Bishop, L. S., Bravyi, S., Cross, A., Gambetta, J. M.,
Smolin, J. (2017). Quantum Volume.
Castelvecchi, D. (2019, October 29). Europe shows first
cards on €1-billion quantum bet. Nature.
Chen, L. (2017, July/August). Cryptography Standards in
Quantum Time: New Wine in an Old Wineskin? IEEE
Security and Privacy.
Chen, L., Jordan, S., Liu, Y-K., Moody, D., Peralta, R.,
Perlner, R., and Smith-Tone, D. (2016, April). NIST
Report on Post-Quantum Cryptography (NISTIR
8105).
Cloud Security Alliance (2019, June). Mitigating the
Quantum Threat with Hybrid Cryptography.
Computing Community Consortium (2019, January 31-
February 1). Identifying Research Challenges in Post
Quantum Cryptography Migration and Cryptographic
Agility. Workshop report.
Crockett, E., Paquin, C., and Stebila, D. (2019, August).
Prototyping post-quantum and hybrid key exchange