MIT Engineers Find Method to Guard IoT from Quantum Attacks

The biggest fear associated with the futuristic quantum computer is, someday they will crack the encryption codes successfully and leak out all the digital information of the users. Although the possibility of such a thing taking place is very narrow, the cryptographers are taking this threat seriously.

The solution to this can be developing encryption schemes which can be used by classical computers and cannot be cracked by quantum computers. Near about 2 weeks ago, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology said that its look out for the quantum-proof algorithms is now in the semi-finals phase. After a year of evaluation, it has currently contracted the field to twenty-six algorithms.

At the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference on Monday in San Francisco, some of the MIT engineers reported about the development of one encryption system which performs a scheme over a chip that is energy-efficient and small enough to shield the battery-powered nodes over the IoT against future quantum threats.

According to the IoT information, the MIT engineers aimed at one group of the post-quantum algorithms, known as lattice-based cryptography. This name is inspired by a method of picturing the issues that will require being solved for cracking such encryption. Think of a 2D grid having points scattered all around it. It may not seem to be much tough to figure out the smallest vector in between one random spot over the lattice as well as the closest point, but amplify the grid to 3D, and then to 1,000 and again to 10,000, and then it becomes sufficient for occupying the computers of today for years.

Utsav Baneerjee, a doctoral student of MIT, said, "Lattice-based cryptography is a promising candidate because of its small public key and signature sizes."

**This post was published on https://spectrum.ieee.org