Post Quantum Cryptography Research Lines in the Italian Center for Security and Rights in Cyberspace

The Italian foundation for Security and Rights in Cyberspace (SERICS) is in charge of managing the current, broad range, research in a variety of computer security domains, ranging from strictly computer related aspects, such as OS and Virtualization security, to the development of new cryptographic techniques, up to tackling human, social and legal problems related to computer security and privacy. The SERICS project is founded by the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), which in turn receives funding from the EU - NextGenerationEU programme. The SERICS foundation is managing the STRIDE project, to tackle the aforementioned research challenges. In the context of the STRIDE projects, a cascade call was made to tackle specific aspects of the overall research challenges. The two-years AQuSDIT project, winner of the aforementioned cascade call, aims to tackle the current open problems in the digital identity realm, with a particular focus on resistance to quantum computer-based attacks, and ledger-based technologies for identification and supply chain tracking. In this context, the research activities at Politecnico di Milano focus on the design of post quantum cryptosystems, and their secure and efficient realization as hardware components, either in the form of full accelerators, or support to existing computing infrastructures. In the following, we will present an overview of the research activities of the 2-year AQuSDIT project, together with an outlook on the first research results which have been obtained by the group of participants from Politecnico di Milano.