Three of the four winning entries were designed in tandem with IBM.
And the person who wrote the fourth has since been hired by Big Blue.
It turns out the big idea here involves making the world quantum safe, before thehack-now-decrypt-latertime-bomb goes off.
As Crowder puts it, the story starts in the mid-nineties with Shors Algorithm.
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The solution
How do you prepare for a problem that doesnt actually exist yet?
And it requires a combination of experience and infrastructure that few organizations on the planet are equipped with.
Per Crowder:
Weve got a long history of security research.
And weve got a long history of quantum research.
And, as mentioned above, IBM went ahead and hired the person responsible for the fourth.
And I wasnt too far off except for the hardware part.
Once NIST finishes accepting all the algorithms and putting its final standards into place, the real work begins.
After the algorithms are invented, they have to be implemented.
And that means innumerable hours spent finding, labeling, and securing data.
