Recent Advances in Post-Quantum Cryptography for Networks: A Survey

The development of quantum computers poses a new security threat to network infrastructures and services, as they will be powerful enough to break the most common forms of digital encryption. Existing encryption services based on Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA), Diffie-Hellman (DH), Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and so on are vulnerable to attacks by quantum computers. Although the gap between today’s quantum computers and the threats they pose to current public-key cryptography is large, the telecommunications landscape should begin planning for the transition to the post-quantum era as early as possible. In this paper, we examine recent advances in Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms from the perspective of the networking and telecommunications industries. The efforts are categorized at three levels, namely communication, computation (consisting of design, implementation and Public Key System (PKS)), and network. Some of the existing challenges and future recommendations for securing communication networks in the post-quantum era are also listed at the end of the paper.