Quantum Xchange of Bethesda joins national cryptography project consortium

Bethesda-based Quantum Xchange Tuesday announced it is collaborating with the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) as part of the Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography Project Consortium.

This move is designed to bring awareness to the issues involved in migrating to the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST’s) post-quantum cryptography and to develop practices to ease replacing current public-key algorithms with NIST-standardized post-quantum algorithms.

Currently, governments and organizations do not have access to a universally acceptable way to guide existing cryptographic standards, guidelines, regulations, or technologies to meet the requirements of migrating to quantum-resistant cryptography. Implementation of quantum-safe algorithms requires identifying hardware and software modules, libraries, and embedded code currently used in an enterprise to support cryptographic key establishment and management underlying the security of cryptographically protected information and access management processes, as well as provide the source and content integrity of data at rest, in transit, and in use.

Initially, the project will focus on demonstrating the discovery tools that can provide automation assistance in identifying where and how public-key cryptography is used in various technologies – specifically those employed in data centers, on-premises, or in the cloud and distributed compute, storage and network infrastructures.

This quantum-safe cryptography discovery project will demonstrate tools for discovering quantum-vulnerable cryptographic code or dependencies on such code for several implementation scenarios.