Guest editors' introduction to the special issue on cryptographic engineering in a post-quantum world: state of the art advances

Abstract

THE vast majority of public-key cryptosystems currently in use is based on integer factorization and (elliptic curve) discrete logarithm problems, which are believed to be intractable with current computing technology. However, these hard problems can be solved in polynomial time by using Shor’s algorithm (or one of its variants) on a quantum computer.