NIST Advances 14 Candidates in Post-Quantum Cryptography Digital Signatures Process

Insider Brief

• NIST has selected 14 digital signature candidates to advance to the second round in the Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process after over a year of evaluation.
• Second-round candidates may submit updated specifications, with this phase of evaluation expected to last 12-18 months.
• NIST plans to hold the 6th PQC Standardization Conference in person from September 24-26, 2025, in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

PRESS RELEASE — After over a year of evaluation, NIST has selected 14 candidates for the second round of the Additional Digital Signatures for the NIST PQC Standardization Process. The advancing digital signature algorithms are:

NIST Internal Report (IR) 8528 describes the evaluation criteria and selection process.  Questions may be directed to pqc-comments@nist.gov. NIST thanks all of the candidate submission teams for their efforts in this standardization process as well as the cryptographic community at large, which helped analyze the signature schemes.

Moving forward, the second-round candidates have the option of submitting updated specifications and implementations (i.e., “tweaks”). NIST will provide more details to the submission teams in a separate message. This second phase of evaluation and review is estimated to last 12-18 months.

NIST is tentatively planning to hold a 6th NIST PQC Standardization Conference from September 24-26, 2025, in person at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland.