State of the art
Cryptography is a main building block of data security and digital exchanges. It is involved in most activities of our daily life: communication networks, smart cards, identity documents, embedded systems in aeronautics, transport, or connected devices («Internet-of-Things»).
According to major leading companies, quantum computers, scaled up to solve computationally hard mathematical problems on which major cryptographic algorithms currently base their security, are about to be built. Relying on new physical concepts, these computers threaten most of the cryptographic applications.
Henceforth, substantial technical changes must be made over the coming years to preserve their security. These changes must guarantee in all these fields a satisfactory and sustainable level of security to ensure the confidentiality of digital exchanges and to ensure that the privacy of users is not threatened.
Objectives of the project
The RISQ project aims to make France a major international player in the post-quantum transition.
One of the objectives of RISQ is to strengthen the presence of the French digital security sector in standardization organizations by bringing together national players with internationally recognized skills. The consortium includes major industrial groups, SMEs and midcaps, government agencies, academic laboratories, in order to concert their actions regarding standards proposals and candidate evaluations. The NIST challenge, announced in 2016 and set up in 2017, is typically an outcome for partners’ proposals as well as a source of candidates for deep analysis.
The project also aims to define a roadmap for the commercialization of post-quantum security product lines – software and hardware cryptographic computation libraries, archiving and timestamp servers – ranging from the design of theoretical building blocks by the partner laboratories to the development and validation of demonstrators. The presence of large groups within the consortium guarantees the adaptability of the developed solutions to the systems deployed at the present time.
Expected outcome
The RISQ project applies to every field of technology using cryptographic methods.
A complete range of encryption products, transaction signature product line and an adaptation of the TLS protocol will be the result of this project.
Hardware and software cryptographic solutions that meet the security and integration requirements of embedded systems will also be included.
In addition, documents to guide industry on the integration of post-quantum technologies into complex systems (defense, cloud, identity and payment markets) will also be produced, as well as reports on the activities of standardization committees.
