Real-World Post-Quantum Digital Signatures

Digital signatures are ubiquitous in modern security infrastructures. Their lack of diversity in industrial settings makes most contemporary systems susceptible to quantum computer-aided attacks. Alternatives exist, among which a family of well-understood schemes with minimal security requirements: hash-based signatures. In addition to being quantum-safe, hash-based signatures are modular, providing long-term security. They are not yet being used in practice. We discuss the reasons for this gap between theory and practice and outline a strategy to bridge it. We then detail our work to realise the described plan