Microsoft, AWS, VMWare, Cisco Systems and Samsung are among 12 companies the National Institute of Standards and Technology has selected to guide the nation’s migration to cryptographic standards that are immune to the computation powers of a quantum machine.
NIST revealed the list of companies Friday, noting their response to the agency’s Federal Register notice last fall, inviting collaborators to participate in the standardization process under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement.
Earlier this month, NIST made a big splash announcing that—after a long international competition—it has identified four algorithms that will form the basis of the new standards and continue to diversify the kinds of math used, to allow for greater resilience of encryption mechanisms heading into a quantum age.
“While we have identified the algorithms … there still is a significant and important block of work ahead of us,” said Matthew Scholl, chief of the computer security division of NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory.
Scholl, briefing NIST’s Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board Wednesday, said over the next, “good couple of months,” the agency, along with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the private-sector entities selected, will generate a primary set of standards for implementing the new algorithms.
“We will work with the submission team and openly with the public community to define the specifics of those implementations, so that they meet the requirements that NIST laid out in our initial Federal Register [notice] back in 2016 about the security strengths of those implementations,” Scholl said. “We will also decide on the implementati ..
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