After years of review, the National Institute of Standards and Technology officially picked the world’s first three post-quantum encryption algorithms as the basis for its post-quantum security strategy: ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA.
NIST first asked cryptographers to develop these new standards in 2016, when the threat of quantum computers started becoming a reality. Quantum computers are expected to be able to break common encryption algorithms used today, such as RSA.
By 2022, 69 such algorithms had been submitted to NIST, out of which the agency chose four for further review. The fourth algorithm, Falcon, was not selected as an initial standard, but evaluation will continue.
