The first HAPKIDO proof of concept is live

In the last quartile WP4 has ultimate the proof of concept which was presented at the PKIConsortium Conference 2023 and it has now been published opensource. The proof of concept consists of a fork of the Digital Signature Service (DSS), a software that allows to sign PDF documents, among others, based on the ETSI standard PAdES. HAPKIDO’s fork introduces hybrid  certificates and allows the usage of post-quantum alternatives ML-DSA (formerly known as CRYSTALS-Dilithium), FN-DSA (formerly known as Falcon), SLH-DSA (formerly known as Sphincs+) as they were the newly chosen standards for digital signatures along with traditional cryptography.

Our choice of hybrid certificates is based on the ITU-T standard as the only current standard concerning hybrid certificates. This choice is further sustained by the fact that the original DSS is implemented in Java, and BouncyCastle (most popular cryptographic library written in Java) already contains a compatible implementation of hybrid certificates.

The code is now available on the official TNO Github page: https://github.com/TNO/Quantum-Safe-DSS

The proof-of-concept has been presented at the 10th ETSI/QC quantum safe cryptography conference by Stefan van den Berg (TNO) in front of an international audience of about 200 participants. The presentation was well received, sparking questions and interesting discussions, as well as raising attention to HAPKIDO project beyond the European community.