NXP Stands at the Forefront of Post-Quantum Cryptography

It’s easy to overlook the extent to which we rely on security keys in our daily lives. The smartphone is an excellent example of security that we take for granted, from our online banking and contactless payments to our private photos shared with family and friends. It’s easy to regard these and other connected IoT devices that use current cryptographic systems as secure. However, that could change in the blink of an eye with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer.

Security experts, including those at NXP, have warned for years that when quantum computing finally emerges from the R&D lab, it will likely be capable of solving problems that no computer today can feasibly solve. Quantum computing’s computational power is measured in qubits. It would take almost 10,000 logical qubits to compromise the popular RSA-3072 public-key algorithm. We aren’t there yet—IBM's Eagle, a 127-qubit quantum processor, broke the 100-qubit barrier in November 2021.

Although we only have 100 qubit computers today, Neven’s Law observes that quantum computers are gaining computational power at a double exponential rate, which is much more aggressive than Moore’s Law. If this upward trend in quantum computing innovation continues, we may see quantum computations capable of solving real-world cryptographic problems in 10 to 15 years. The ability to instantly perform massive calculations threatens our entire standardized public-key infrastructure (PKI), and the impact extends across security for every digital connection imaginable.

This security threat is much more dangerous than other security threats because legacy keys are not patchable. That means security keys issued today will be under threat when quantum computers become available. Everything from your car to your bank to your connected light switches can be compromised by a large-scale quantum computer.

Unauthorized access to over-the-air firmware update mechanisms in our vehicles opens up the possibility of adversaries installing dangerous modifications. Audit trails and digitally signed documents associated with car safety certifications could be retrospectively modified or forged. Critical industrial and public service infrastructure for healthcare, utilities and transportation could become exposed, potentially destabilizing cities and creating other dangerous security breaches.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. I am very proud to work with a team that saw this threat coming and has been working to create new cryptography solutions that will help keep our data and devices safe and secure.

Cryptography provides the building blocks to security, where standardization bodies such as the US’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) or the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) continue to play a vital role. Like NXP, they are keenly aware of the impact that quantum computing will have on the classic security techniques employed today. To ensure suitable replacement cryptographic standards are in place before the standard cryptography security techniques are no longer secure, NIST launched a global post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) competition in late 2016. We were eager to be part of the solution and immediately put our best security experts to work alongside colleagues in academia and across the industry to submit algorithms that might serve as the foundation for the future of post-quantum cryptography.

NIST’s selection criteria emphasized mathematical security and algorithm design. Our highly knowledgeable security experts took a deep dive into the practical implementation aspects for both algorithms, paying particular attention to physical side-channel and fault attack vectors. Of the four key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) finalists announced in 2020, we are proud that two are co-authored by NXP security experts. This week, NIST made their first announcement regarding the selection of the winners from amongst these finalists. The Crystals-Kyber algorithm co-authored by the security experts at NXP was among the winners that will be standardized. A second co-authored submission, Classic McEliece, was selected to move forward to the next round for further analysis and consideration for standardization.

I could not be more proud of the NXP security experts who are part of this groundbreaking solution. The algorithms selected by NIST are needle-moving innovations that will help ensure the continued security of data and devices across all aspects of our world, from cars, to city infrastructure, to smartphones, to IoT devices.

Now the industry must begin the process of bridging today’s cybersecurity standards with the post-quantum standards of tomorrow. These post-quantum standards must be able to protect against the security threat posed by quantum computers, but able to run on a classic computer with the help of new and existing cryptographic hardware accelerators.

This will be difficult to achieve, but I have every confidence that the deep expertise of our cryptography team is up to the challenge. In fact, our skilled team has developed products that already support new algorithms, provided by the Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite (CNSA Suite), that transition between current-day techniques and a quantum-resistance approach.

Moving forward with the new post-quantum cryptography standards, our security engineers and cryptographers will continue to ensure that the practical needs of embedded security for a post-quantum future are met.