Post-quantum Certificates for Electronic Travel Documents

摘要

Public key cryptosystems play a crucial role in the security of widely used communication protocols and in the protection of data. However, the foreseen emergence of quantum computers will break the security of most of the asymmetric cryptographic techniques used today, including those used to verify the authenticity of electronic travel documents. The security of international borders would thus be jeopardised in a quantum scenario. To overcome the threat to current asymmetric cryptography, post-quantum cryptography aims to provide practical mechanisms which are resilient to attacks using quantum computers. In this paper, we investigate the practicality of employing post-quantum digital signatures to ensure the authenticity of an electronic travel document. We created a special-purpose public key infrastructure based on these techniques, and give performance results for both creation and verification of certificates. This is the first important step towards specifying the next generation of electronic travel documents, as well as providing a valuable test use case for post-quantum techniques.