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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Mathematician, cryptologist, and computer scientist, Daniel J Bernstein has written a detailed blog post about the McEliece cryptosystem [cr.yp.to]. Specifically he covers what Classic McEliece does , how the parameter sets were selected, its small ciphertexts, what NIST says about ISO standardization. what NIST says about deployment, a note about one performance number, a second note about FrodoKEM, and finally what NIST says about security.

Once upon a time, NIST started working on standardizing post-quantum cryptography, and announced [archive.org] that "The goal of this process is to select a number of acceptable candidate cryptosystems for standardization".

By now NIST has quite a few standards for post-quantum signatures. It has already standardized Dilithium (ML-DSA), LMS, SPHINCS+ (SLH-DSA), and XMSS. It said in 2022 that it will also standardize Falcon (FN-DSA) "because its small bandwidth may be necessary in certain applications" [archive.org]. It is evaluating more options for post-quantum signatures, such as small-signature large-key options. Evidently NIST will end up with at least six post-quantum signature standards.

For post-quantum encryption, NIST's offerings are much more sparse. NIST has just one standard, namely Kyber (ML-KEM). It said in March 2025 that it also plans to standardize HQC; supposedly the patent on HQC won't be an issue because of an upcoming FRAND license; but an April 2025 posting regarding design flaws in HQC [archive.org] prompted an HQC team announcement that HQC would be modified [archive.org]. Doesn't look like HQC is ready for usage yet.

Wait. What about the increasingly widely deployed [mceliece.org] McEliece cryptosystem?

Previously:
(2025) NIST Selects HQC as Fifth Algorithm for Post-Quantum Encryption [soylentnews.org]
(2024) Here’s the Paper No One Read Before Declaring the Demise of Modern Cryptography [soylentnews.org]
(2023) Signal Adds Quantum-resistant Encryption to its E2EE Messaging Protocol [soylentnews.org]
(2023) NIST Releases Draft Post-Quantum Encryption Document [soylentnews.org]
… and many more.

Original Submission