Post Quantum Computing Cryptography Just Had a Giant Step Forward

Important news that will impact the distributed ledger community and particularly the entire discussion around custody. Post Quantum computing cryptography just had a giant step forward. This is incredibly important because Shor’s algorithm allows quantum computers to factor integers very quickly and this can be used to crack specific private keys when the public key is known (this allows algebraic based cryptography to be cracked). This can obviously cause problems with a distributed ledger system or DeFi or crypto in general. This can not disrupt the ledger but can destroy certain consensus mechanisms for new blocks and attack specific wallets. The selection of these four standards for Lattice Based (Geometrically based cryptography) allows companies like 3L2QD and others to wrap a SHA-256 private key in a multi sig function that moves the distributed economy forward.

SPHINCS+ is a stateless hash based signature scheme which could be use as a replacement versus a wrap(I just started learning about SPHINCS+ today, and I am barely aware of basics, I need several guys on my team to give me a full tutorial). The work of folks building solutions defending against quantum attack on unique wallets has just been sped up dramatically based on NIST’s four final algorithm selections for Post-Quantum cryptography.

I enjoy reading these, watching videos on these, particularly by Chris Piekert at University of Michigan. Zero Knowledge proofs (ZKsnark & ZKraisds) will revolutionize custody around pledging, accounting, and multiple states of books for different accounting standards (IBOR, ABOR, MBOR, or TBOR) – that refer to a closed trade (open books – real time, looking at intra-day positions) or to settlement (closed periodically – i.e. daily). Instantaneous settlement and the real time reconciliation will allow merging of these two over time (I think like 7+ years for most securities), but we will see these collapse with digital instruments (i.e. tokenized funds) in the near term. In this case automatic syncing of wallets and the idea of custody changes dramatically. The need to service a digital instrument with delegate/write function across multiple chains for multiple pieces of the capital stack of a single assets (or portfolio) is very different from custody of BTC. This is the future of custody. Being quantum resistant is a must for all those players…below is part of the future ante …

• NIST Announces First Four Quantum-Resistant Cryptographic Algorithms

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