PhD Project in Advancing Future Post-Quantum Digital Signatures

Digital signatures are used widely to ensure authentication, this means Alice can check that she received a message from Bob and not Eve. Signatures are used in important cryptographic protocols such as TLS to enable secure communications over a network. Moreover, there are additional types of signature schemes, such as group signatures or threshold signatures, which offer functionality for multiple parties for a variety of interesting applications. Given the ongoing advancements in quantum computing, there is an effort to ensure our current public key cryptography withstands attacks via known classical and quantum algorithms, such as Shor’s algorithm, and to ensure diversity and security of cryptography. With this, there are ongoing global standardisation efforts in digital signatures, with new schemes introduced and requiring further analysis in terms of performance and security. This project aims to advance the state of the art in post-quantum cryptographic digital signatures.

This project will focus on digital signatures, investigating the hardware implementation, security, and optimisation of such schemes, leading to increased performance with consideration to real world scenarios.

The objectives include:

[1] Become familiar with digital signatures, particularly for post-quantum cryptography (PQC).

[2] Understand the current challenges and identify limitations in PQC signature schemes.

[3] Select one or more promising signature schemes, with consideration of the NIST PQC additional signatures competition.

[4] Investigate and propose novel algorithmic or hardware optimisations to address identified limitations, for example to accelerate schemes, increase security, or to extend functionality.

[5] Demonstrate proposed techniques in a working hardware design or hardware-software co-design, benchmarking results for a target PQC application, on a suitable platform (e.g. FPGA).

Funding Information

To be eligible for consideration for a Home DfE or EPSRC Studentship (covering tuition fees and maintenance stipend of approx. £19,237 per annum), a candidate must satisfy all the eligibility criteria based on nationality, residency and academic qualifications.

To be classed as a Home student, candidates must meet the following criteria and the associated residency requirements:

• Be a UK National,
or • Have settled status,
or • Have pre-settled status,
or • Have indefinite leave to remain or enter the UK.

Candidates from ROI may also qualify for Home student funding.

Previous PhD study MAY make you ineligible to be considered for funding.

Please note that other terms and conditions also apply.

Please note that any available PhD studentships will be allocated on a competitive basis across a number of projects currently being advertised by the School.

A small number of international awards will be available for allocation across the School. An international award is not guaranteed to be available for this project, and competition across the School for these awards will be highly competitive.

Academic Requirements:

The minimum academic requirement for admission is normally an Upper Second Class Honours degree from a UK or ROI Higher Education provider in a relevant discipline, or an equivalent qualification acceptable to the University.