NIST Recruits Post-Quantum in Cybersecurity Project Against HNDL Attacks

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has enlisted Post-Quantum in its consortium of organizations engaged in a project dubbed “Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography” with the primary task of battling “Harvest Now Decrypt Later” cyberattacks.

Post-Quantum, touted as the world’s first PQC firm, will support the project by developing practical PQC implementation and use cases, the NIST said Tuesday.

The institute described HNDL attacks as the world’s top cybersecurity threat, with hostile actors taking current encrypted data for decryption once a cryptographically capable computer becomes available. 

The PQC project is under the NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, gathering professionals from the public and private sectors in a group called Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography Building Block Consortium to help secure complex information technology systems and protect critical U.S. infrastructure. The project’s participants include Palo Alto Networks, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Microsoft, VMWare and other vendors open to sharing their PQC expertise.

Andersen Cheng, Post-Quantum’s executive chairman, said the company looks forward to sharing its PQC protocols, which include a new system for hybrid quantum-safe virtual private networks ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 2023.