This post was originally published on Cointelgraph
Why upgrade if PQ signatures are not yet proven?
The dirty secret of efforts to upgrade blockchains to post-quantum cryptography is that no one is sure if any of them work.
None of the signatures being considered by major blockchains as quantum-resistant upgrades have been 100% proven to work. Until a quantum computer is invented, we won’t know for certain if they can successfully protect against an attack. Some may fall to an attack even before Q Day using existing computer technology.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology tested 69 post-quantum candidate algorithms, and two of them — Rainbow and SIKE — were broken with classical computers during testing.
The three digital signature schemes it recommends are its best guess as to which ones are most likely to survive a quantum attack. It selected the lattice-based CRYSTALS-Dilithium (ML-DSA) as the primary scheme, another lattice-based scheme called Falcon (FN-DSA) for use cases that demand smaller signatures and the hash based SPHINCS+ (SLH-DSA) as the final candidate.
“If something looks good, they’re going to say: ‘OK, try it. We’ll let you know when something fails.’ And then we expect you to change,” explains Yoon Auh from post-quantum tech provider BOLTS.
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