Guest Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue on Cryptographic Engineering in a Post-Quantum World: State of the Art Advances

The papers in this special section examine the impact of cryptographic engineering in a post-quantum world. The vast majority of public-key cryptosystems currently in use is based on integer factorization and (elliptic curve) discrete logarithm problems, which are believed to be intractable with current computing technology. However, these hard problems can be solved in polynomial time by using Shor’s algorithm (or one of its variants) on a quantum computer. Recent progress towards the development of a largescale, fault-tolerant quantum computer has motivated the interest for post-quantum cryptography (a.k.a. quantum-safe or quantum-resistant cryptography) by governments, enterprises and the cryptography community.