NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Program Enters ‘Selection Round’
One thing that bothers me about most of these algorithms is how conceptually difficult they are for me to understand. I don&#x27;t have that strong of a background in cryptography but there is something special about how with RSA you can do it at a small scale by hand. With very limited notes I can explain to a group of high schoolers almost exactly how this vital part of encryption functions and even vulnerabilities in it (small exponent values, etc). While rolling your own crypto is bad, with a bit of work I&#x27;d expect almost any programmer to be able to implement RSA without too much difficulty.<p>I&#x27;m not sure how important being able to explain encryption algorithms in detail to high school students is, but I&#x27;ll definitely be sad when RSA and other non-quantum resistant algorithms join the likes of the enigma machine and exist for demonstration process only. I&#x27;m hopeful in time less crypto minded people (like me) will better understand module learning with errors or lattice based cryptography and maybe we&#x27;ll get better at explaining it. It would be a shame if even more of cryptography into an unintelligible black box to eke out performance gains.