Microsoft Adds Post-Quantum Cryptography To an OpenVPN Fork (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft recently published an interesting open source project called "PQCrypto-VPN" that implements post-quantum cryptography (PQC) within OpenVPN. Being developed by the Microsoft Research Security and Cryptography group, as part of their research into post-quantum cryptography, this fork is being used to test PQC algorithms and their performance and functionality when used with VPNs.

Microsoft's PQCrypto-VPN is published on Github and allows anyone to build an OpenVPN implementation that can encrypt communications using three different post-quantum cryptography protocols, with more coming as they are developed. These protocols are: (1) Frodo: a key exchange protocol based on the learning with errors problem (2) SIKE: a key exchange protocol based on Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman and (3) Picnic: a signature algorithm using symmetric-key primitives and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs.

Comments

Re:Wait!

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Microsoft? Security? Something doesn't seem quite right.

For me, security and Microsoft is not the issue. It's trust and Microsoft.

As in, "I trust Microsoft, as far as I can throw them."

Re:A HARD problem.

[BitterOak]

So where's the quantum hardware to making this all work?

I was confused by this point too, till I did some reading. "Post-quantum cryptography" is NOT the same thing as "Quantum cryptography". The former merely refers to cryptographic algorithms for which there are no known algorithms for quantum computers which can break them. So, RSA would not be considered post-quantum, because Shore's algorithm can break it.