Post-Quantum Cryptography Alliance Brings Accelerated Computing to Post Quantum Cryptography with NVIDIA cuPQC

Cryptographic Protocols Future-Proofed Against Quantum Interference  Securely Implemented By Linux Foundation and NVIDIA.

SAN FRANCISCO – January, 29, 2025 – The Post-Quantum Cryptography Alliance (PQCA), a part of the Linux Foundation, today announced that its open source project, Open Quantum Safe (OQS), now integrates the NVIDIA cuPQC library to support and encourage the transition to quantum-resistant cryptography.

By leveraging cuPQC’s functionality within its LibOQS library, the Open Quantum Safe Project can provide users GPU-accelerated implementations of cryptographic primitives that are safe against attacks from future quantum computing technology – which threaten to crack other commonly used cryptosystems.

Although quantum computing is still in its early stages, post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is a pressing challenge, as ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ attacks hoard today’s sensitive and poorly protected data, with the aim of decrypting it using future quantum devices. This highlights the pressing need to adopt quantum-secure cryptographic primitives, a challenge compounded by the lack of secure, fast, and flexible implementations of key PQC algorithms.

“Ensuring adoption of post-quantum cryptography is one of the most pressing issues in data security”, said Hart Montgomery, CTO of LF Decentralized Trust. “Working with NVIDIA to integrate cuPQC into LibOQS is a huge move towards meeting this challenge.”

New PQC standards mean that large ISP, SCP, and NSP enterprises must be able to perform millions of cryptographic operations every second in order to remain secure. Previous CPU-based implementations have been limited to performing tens of thousands of operations per second, whereas cuPQC is able to perform over a million. 

Through cuPQC, LibOQS will provide GPU-accelerated implementations of NIST-approved ML-KEM and ML-DSA cryptographic primitives.  Tailored for GPU hardware, these implementations offer hardware-level security, speed through parallelized algorithms, and ‘crypto-agility’ – the ability to easily switch in new algorithm developments through their seamless integration at the software-level. 

"cuPQC's exceptional performance enables security frameworks to bring practical Post Quantum Cryptography to data-intensive environments," said Tim Costa, Senior Director of CAE, Quantum and CUDA-X at NVIDIA. "cuPQC's integration with liboqs is a crucial step toward widespread adoption of Post Quantum Cryptography"

By leveraging cuPQC, LibOQS now supports applications with high throughput requirements, such as TLS offloading, cryptographic key generation and management, batched signature verifications and many other tasks essential by large-scale users such as data centers and cloud service providers.

The integration also enables the cryptographic research community, ensuring they have access to the powerful tools needed for developing future iterations of quantum-resistant cryptographic protocols. 

Open Quantum Safe is a project within the Linux Foundation’s PQCA, which aims to facilitate a smoother migration to PQC for industry users. The new functionality in LibOQS is now publicly available to all users. To learn more about Open Quantum Safe and the PQCA, please visit https://pqca.org/.

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Media Contact

Noah Lehman

The Linux Foundation

nlehman@linuxfoundation.org