PoC by Toppan, partners on tech for secure transition to PQC successful

A partnership between Toppan Holdings, Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Isara Corporation has developed technology to enable certificate authority frameworks to migrate from their current cryptographic practices for secure internet communications to post-quantum cryptography (PQC).

They successfully completed a proof of concept for the technology showing that it can maintain the security of the digital certificates that verify the identity of entities communicating and the public key infrastructure (PKI) in which certificate authorities sign and issue those certificates.

Authorities have long been warning and preparing for the approaching arrival of quantum computing that can break the cryptographic protections on all kinds of sensitive data, including digital IDs and biometrics.

The partners sought to show that the migration to PQC could avoid a transition phase with service disruptions or outages.

Isara developed a secondary crypto-agile root certificate that issues digital certificates to facilitate the migration between current cryptographic systems like ECDSA and PQC algorithms like ML-DSA.

Toppan provided a smart card system that was integrated with the secondary root certificate on a quantum cryptography network testbed developed by NICT for the PoC.

The result was a smooth transition from existing certificate authentication infrastructure to PQC demonstrated in a simulated transition phase. Toppan and partners used both current cryptographic methods and PQC during that simulated transition to perform smart card-based ID verification and access the internet.

ML-DSA is one of the three post-quantum encryption algorithms standardized by NIST. It has been implemented by organizations including the IOTA Foundation to protect its decentralized identity framework, and is natively supported by Entrust’s nShield Hardware Security Module to protect enterprise assets.

A portion of the PQC project was requested by the Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP) led by Japan’s Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (CSTI).

The partners will share details of the PoC at the Quantum Computing Expo Tokyo, on April 15 to 17.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital ID  |  identity management  |  identity verification  |  Japan  |  post-quantum cryptography  |  Toppan