Dear Colleagues,

There is a major vulnerability at the heart of the digital world. Existing public-key encryption schemes, such as key-exchange protocols used by TLS/HTTPS connections, RSA/ECDSA signatures used by certification authorities, and transactions used by cryptocurrencies, among others, are all vulnerable to quantum cryptanalysis. Indeed, the majority of such encryption systems rely on the difficulty of integer factorization or discrete logarithm problems that can be solved by a quantum computer in polynomial time. Therefore, there is a critical need to develop, analyze, and implement new encryption pillars to secure the future of electronic systems. Post-quantum cryptography seeks such cryptographic solutions. The ongoing NIST’s post-quantum encryption standardization process calls an urgent effort in all aspects of realizing these systems. Theoretical security of post-quantum systems should be evaluated both in the quantum and classical case, higher-level protocols based on these encryptions should be developed, hardware/software efficiency and implementation security of their unique arithmetic structures should be analyzed on a multitude of platforms, and, at the same time, mistakes of prior public-key encryption standards should be avoided while foreseeing potential difficulties for transitioning to a new one.  Given the space of existing proposals, there is also a need for a fair, comprehensive, and comparative analysis of potential solutions. This special edition targets all these aspects. We invite submissions from cryptographers, cryptographic engineers, standardization bodies, and developers working with existing standards.

Prof. Dr. Aydin Aysu
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Cryptography is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Post-quantum cryptography
• Quantum and classical cryptanalysis
• Higher-level protocols using post-quantum encryption
• Hardware and software acceleration
• Implementation attacks: fault attacks and side-channel analysis
• Cryptographic standardization challenges