Practical Introduction to Quantum-Safe Cryptography
Practical introduction to quantum-safe cryptography is a free online course on the IBM Quantum Learning platform and serves as a primer on the foundational concepts in quantum-safe cryptography.
This course was created for developers who are interested in modernizing their application security and features multimodal lessons and interactive live code examples in four core areas of cryptography: cryptographic hash functions, symmetric key cryptography, asymmetric key cryptography, and quantum-safe cryptography.
By taking this course, developers will learn how the cybersecurity risk landscape is evolving as well as explore contemporary approaches poised to shape the quantum era.
Lessons
- Course introduction
- Key takeaways for this course
- Tips for navigating this course
- Before you begin
- Lesson structure
- Running the Python examples
- Digital Certification
- Pre-course Survey
- Next steps after this course
- Introduction
- Introduction to cryptographic hashing
- Basic rationale and design of hash functions
- Example of cryptographic hashing in Python with SHA-256
- Applications of cryptographic hashing
- Security of cryptographic hashing
- Commonly used cryptographic hash functions
- Summary
- Introduction
- Introduction to symmetric key cryptography
- Properties of symmetric key cryptosystems
- Illustration of symmetric key encryption using python
- Applications of symmetric key cryptography
- Principles of symmetric key encryption
- Popular symmetric key algorithms
- Advantages of symmetric key cryptography
- Challenges and limitations of symmetric key cryptography
- Quantum computing and symmetric key encryption: Risks and mitigation
- Summary
- Introduction
- Introduction to asymmetric key cryptography
- Key exchange with asymmetric key cryptography
- Digital signatures with asymmetric key cryptography
- Applications of asymmetric key cryptography
- Security of asymmetric key cryptography
- RSA
- Breaking RSA
- Diffie-Hellman key exchange and the Digital Signature Algorithm
- Breaking Diffie-Hellman and DSA
- Elliptic curve cryptography
- Summary
- Introduction
- Introduction to quantum-safe cryptography
- Quantum algorithms and impacts to cryptography
- Basic principles of quantum-safe cryptography
- NIST standardization of quantum-safe cryptography
- Lattice-based cryptography
- Module-LWE and the CRYSTALS suite
- Hybrid cryptography
- Summary
- What's next?
- Post-Course Survey
- Digital Certification
- Full list of references
Exam
Take this exam to test your skills. This exam is intended to be taken after reading the lessons in this course. Once you have completed the exam, come back here to see your earned badge.
Awarded badge
Helpful materials
The following may be useful to you when reading through the course:
Pre-reading
This course contains a lot of detail on cryptography, and numerous maths examples which may use terminology and symbols you are not familiar with.
This Presentation offers:
- A primer on cryptography
- An introduction to some of the maths concepts used in this course
Course review
After completing the course you may find it useful to have a summary of what's been learnt as a take-away.
This Presentation includes the core content from this course in presentation form which can you download and refer back to.
Further reading
- Basics of quantum information which offers an introduction to principles of quantum information and computation
- Fundamentals of quantum algorithms which explores computational advantages of quantum systems, and includes further details on algorithms such as Grover's algorithm
- IBM Quantum Safe
- Why it’s time to take quantum-safe cryptography seriously
- Fundamentals of Encryption & Quantum-Safe Techniques
Credly
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