August 23, 2019: The Second Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Conference was organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today at Armonk, NY.

With the era of Quantum Computing slowly dawning, IBM announces to offer a Quantum Risk Assessment service to help customers assess their risk in the quantum world, provide quantum-safe cryptography services on the IBM public cloud by 2020, and also donate quantum-safe cryptographic algorithms to open source community; a major step towards maintaining the highest level of security of its client's data and privacy in the future from fault-tolerant quantum computers.

"IBM Cloud is taking the critical steps needed to help enterprises ensure their data stays secure in a quantum future," said Harish Grama, General Manager, IBM Cloud. "Starting in 2020, IBM Cloud will roll out new services that will help keep data secured and private from the emerging cyber security challenges presented by future quantum computers."

 Moreover, before going forward with its commercialization, IBM cryptographers have also carefully prototyped the world's first quantum computing safe enterprise class tape. From the time quantum computers were made available by IBM (IBM Q Experience platform) through its public cloud in May 2016, users have executed more than 28 million experiments and simulations on the quantum cloud platform and published over 180 third-party research papers. Quantum Systems will also impact information security, and will create new opportunities for improving security for data both on-premises and in the cloud. 

Developing Cryptographic Algorithms to Address Potential Security Concerns

"In order to prepare for the impact that quantum computers are expected to have on data security, IBM Research has been developing cryptographic algorithms that are designed to be resistant to the potential security concerns posed by quantum computers,” said Vadim Lyubashevsky, Cryptographer at IBM Research.

Based on two quantum resistant cryptographic primitives – Kyber, a secure key encapsulation mechanism, and Dilithium, a secure digital signature algorithm, CRYSTALS (Cryptographic Suite for Algebraic Lattices) has been developed jointly in collaboration with several academic and commercial partners.  And to further develop open standards, it has been donated to OpenQuantumSafe.org. IBM Research has also recently launched a Security Subscription service which provides quarterly reports and seminars, currently the next seminar planned for October 2, 2019 in Zurich, Switzerland.