Author Archives: Christiane Peters

Classic McEliece – one of the NIST PQC Round 3 Finalists

NIST announced yesterday that Classic McEliece is one of the Round-3 Finalists in the Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process.

“As such, NIST selected Classic McEliece as a finalist and believes it could be ready for standardization (should NIST choose to select it) at the end of the third round.”

The full report by NIST can be found here.

The Classic McEliece submission in Round 3 is a merger of the Classic McEliece and NTS-KEM submissions to the previous rounds. The submission builds on code-based cryptography with binary Goppa codes, a proposal that has not been broken for more than 40 years.

Architect Certification

I completed the Level 2 certification as IBM and Open Group Architect in October 2019. This certification is not a one-time sit-down learn-stuff-by-heart and forget-all-again. Instead, I earned the certification by working continuously as architect for multiple years and by demonstrating my achievements to an internal review board at IBM.

I have led several large projects as security architect. My reference projects concerned architectures for smart metering security, cryptography services for financial services, and enterprise security architectures. I followed a series of trainings on architecture, design thinking, consulting and project management. I also specialized not only in security architecture, but also learned how IT is managed for a specific industry: in my case I focused on banks. Further I earned this certification by giving presentations at international conferences and summer schools, by creating reusable assets, and last but not least by mentoring others.

NIST PQCrypto Classic McEliece submission

Classic McEliece Submission to NIST‘s Post-Quantum Standardization together with Daniel J. Bernstein, Tung Chou, Tanja Lange, Ingo von Maurich, Rafael Misoczki, Ruben Niederhagen, Edoardo Persichetti, Peter Schwabe, Nicolas Sendrier, Jakub Szefer, and Wen Wang.

Great to see that my Ph.D. research is relevant for the next crypto standardization, i.e., the parameters in the 2008 paper Attacking and defending the McEliece cryptosystem are still holding up.

screenshot-2008-paper

Now included as the IND-CCA2 KEM parameters for mceliece6960119:

m = 13, n = 6960, t = 119, l = 256.

Moreover, more PQCrypto code-based crypto submissions also used my complexity computations to determine the security level of their proposals.

Enterprise Key and Certificate Management

I gave a lecture at the ECRYPT winter school in Zurich, Switzerland on how large enterprises manage cryptographic keys and public-key certificates.

One of the goals was to bridge the gap between industry and academia. I.e., answering the question: how long will it take to get pqcrypto research into practice in a large enterprise environment.