Project description

After its introduction in the 1970s, asymmetric cryptography, which underlies all our digital communications, is going through its most profound change in recent years. In fact, it has been known since the 1990s that the eventual availability of a quantum computer would have allowed an attacker to easily break most of the popular asymmetric encryption systems, such as RSA, ElGamal and elliptic curves. If until the early 2000s the realization of a quantum computer for practical use remained only theoretical, in recent years a real race has begun toward the realization of sufficiently large quantum computers.

In this scenario, international stakeholders have long since begun to invest substantial resources on the research and engineering of new cryptographic tools capable of resisting quantum computer-equipped attackers, also called quantum-safe or post-quantum cryptosystems, so that they can be used to replace their quantum-vulnerable predecessors. This process involves both the scientific community, also stimulated by international competition led by NIST, and the industrial community.

National positioning within this scenario therefore becomes strategic to preserve the protection of national assets, such as data and ICT systems, as well as to preserve the competitiveness of national companies operating in the sector of data protection and cybersecurity. The present project has the purpose of strengthening and advancing national expertise in this area, both from the standpoint of research and its application to industrial contexts, with focus on code-based cryptography, which, in addition to lattice-based one, represents one of the most promising families of post-quantum cryptosystems, and on which the national community and the proposing institution have already acquired a relevant scientific position at the international level.

The project will address some important open challenges in post-quantum cryptography, which are widely recognized as such by the international community. They are:

  1. Design new post-quantum encryption and secret key exchange schemes based on codes and consolidate existing schemes.
  2. Design new secure and efficient post-quantum identification and digital signature schemes based on codes.
  3. Find new attack techniques against post-quantum cryptosystems based on codes to consolidate their security.
  4. Design and prototype post-quantum code-based cryptosystems implementations for resource-contrained architectures.
  5. Experiment post-quantum cryptography in real scenarios concerning both terrestrial and satellite communications.