Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization is a program and competition by NIST to update their standards to include post-quantum cryptography. It was announced at PQCrypto 2016. 23 signature schemes and 59 encryption/KEM schemes were submitted by the initial submission deadline at the end of 2017 of which 69 total were deemed complete and proper and participated in the first round. Seven of these, of which 3 are signature schemes, have advanced to the third round, which was announced on July 22, 2020. Background Academic research on the potential impact of quantum computing dates back to at least 2001. A NIST published report from April 2016 cites experts that acknowledge the possibility of quantum technology to render the commonly used RSA algorithm insecure by 2030. As a result, a need to standardize quantum-secure cryptographic primitives was pursued. Since most symmetric primitives are relatively easy to modify in a way that makes them quantum resistant, efforts have focused on public-key cryptography, namely digital signatures and key encapsulation mechanisms. In December 2016 NIST initiated a standardization process by announcing a call for proposals. The competition is now in its third round out of expected four, where in each round some algorithms are discarded and others are studied more closely. NIST hopes to publish the standardization documents by 2024, but may speed up the process if major breakthroughs in quantum computing are made. It is currently undecided whether the future standards be published as FIPS or as NIST Special Publication (SP). Round one Under consideration were: (strikethrough means it had been withdrawn) Round one submissions published attacks Guess Again by Lorenz Panny RVB by Lorenz Panny RaCoSS by Daniel J. Bernstein, Andreas Hülsing, Tanja Lange and Lorenz Panny HK17 by Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange SRTPI by Bo-Yin Yang WalnutDSA by Ward Beullens and Simon R. Blackburn by Matvei Kotov, Anton Menshov and Alexander Ushakov DRS by Yang Yu and Léo Ducas DAGS by Elise Barelli and Alain Couvreur Edon-K by Matthieu Lequesne and Jean-Pierre Tillich RLCE by Alain Couvreur, Matthieu Lequesne, and Jean-Pierre Tillich Hila5 by Daniel J. Bernstein, Leon Groot Bruinderink, Tanja Lange and Lorenz Panny Giophantus by Ward Beullens, Wouter Castryck and Frederik Vercauteren RankSign by Thomas Debris-Alazard and Jean-Pierre Tillich McNie by Philippe Gaborit; Terry Shue Chien Lau and Chik How Tan Round two Candidates moving on to the second round were announced on January 30, 2019. They are: Round three