Digital signatures are a fundamental part of our daily lives, ensuring the authenticity of financial transactions, legal documents, and multimedia contents. However, advances in quantum computing pose a threat to most digital signature algorithms currently in use.
To address this challenge, the NIST, the U.S. agency dedicated to developing technological standards, started an international competition to standardize post-quantum digital signature algorithms. After a year of worldwide public scrutiny, 14 finalists were selected out of the 40 initial proposals.
Among the finalists, two schemes — CROSS (Codes and Restricted Objects Signature Scheme) and LESS (Linear Equivalence Signature Scheme) — feature the participation of Prof. Alessandro Barenghi and Prof. Gerardo Pelosi from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering – Politecnico di Milano as co-authors and lead engineers of the proposals.