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The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) helps organizations better understand, manage, reduce, and communicate cybersecurity risks. NIST is updating the CSF to keep pace with the evolving cybersecurity landscape. The CSF 2.0 Concept Paper released today outlines more significant potential changes in the CSF. It is informed by extensive feedback in response to the NIST Cybersecurity Request for Information and the first workshop on CSF 2.0. NIST is publishing this concept paper to gain additional input before issuing a draft CSF 2.0 this Summer. Please share feedback by March 3, 2023,via cyberframework@nist.gov."

While quantum machines are still a long way from being able to break modern encryption, US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched a competition in 2016 to develop new standards for cryptography that will be more quantum-proof. The winners are set to be announced in 2022, but last week the organization announced that it had narrowed the initial field of 69 contenders down to just 15. And so far a single approach to "post-quantum cryptography" accounts for the majority of the finalists: lattice-based cryptography. Lattice-based cryptography instead uses enormous grids with billions of individual points across thousands of dimensions. Breaking the code means getting from one specific point to another-which is essentially impossible unless you know the route. NIST thinks is that lattice problems are really hard, but they seem quite efficient in terms of time to generate keys, time to construct signatures, and also efficient in terms of memory.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced the first four quantum-resistant encryption algorithms, after a six-year competitive evaluation process.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published a technical paper on the ways in which stablecoins are architected and implemented. This includes a descriptive definition, commonly found properties, and distinguishing characteristics, as well as an exploration of stablecoin taxonomies, descriptions of the most common types, and examples from a list of top stablecoins by market capitalization. This document also explores related security, safety, and trust issues with an analysis conducted from a computer science and information technology security perspective as opposed to the financial analysis and economics focus of much of the stablecoin literature

Crypto agility describes the capabilities needed to replace and adapt cryptographic algorithms for protocols, applications, software, hardware, and infrastructures without interrupting the flow of a running system to achieve resiliency. This draft NIST Cybersecurity White Paper (CSWP) provides an in-depth survey of current approaches and considerations to achieving crypto agility. It discusses challenges, trade-offs, and some approaches to providing operational mechanisms for achieving crypto agility while maintaining interoperability. It also highlights some critical working areas that require additional discussion.

On July 5, 2022, the U.S. government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) selected four protocols that, with some revision, will be deployed as a cryptographic quantum shield, plus four additional candidates still under consideration. However, almost immediately, a pair of researchers broke one of those candidates in an hour on a laptop.

Moody's Ratings published a report on recent advances in quantum computing that will threaten encryption techniques used today. Data encryption standards able to withstand the power of quantum computers have been unveiled by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that will protect intellectual property and classified government documents from computers that leverage the properties of quantum mechanics to perform calculations exponentially faster than classical computers. However, the transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) will be long and costly.

IDEMIA Secure Transactions (IST) demonstrated the first ever offline central bank digital currency (CBDC) payments incorporating enhanced security against quantum threats. Offline CBDC allows digital currency transactions without internet, ensuring cash-like secure and seamless payments in areas with limited connectivity. This offline CBDC payment transaction uses quantum-resistant public key cryptography endorsed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The offline transactions demonstrated as part of this quantum-safe solution are performed using two smartphones thanks to NFC. Money is stored inside a secure element fortified with quantum-safe cryptography to guarantee security and prevent the risks of double spending or unauthorized money creation.

"Current quantum computers are still toy prototypes, and the engineering advances required to build a functionally useful quantum computer are somewhere between a few years away and impossible. Even so, we already know that that such a computer could potentially factor large numbers and compute discrete logs, and break the RSA and Diffie-Hellman public-key algorithms in all of the useful key sizes."