Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is a critical technique for safeguarding digital information in the quantum computing era. To understand recent research trends in PQC, we analyzed articles from Web of Science using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). We conducted two LDA analyses: one on PQC articles from 2020 to the first half of 2024, and another on articles from 2023 to the first half of 2024. The first analysis yielded five topic groups, while the second resulted in six. These findings provide insights into the evolving research landscape and potential shifts in PQC focus.
Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is a critical technique for safeguarding digital information in the quantum computing era. To understand recent research trends in PQC, we analyzed articles from Web of Science using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). We conducted two LDA analyses: one on PQC articles from 2020 to the first half of 2024, and another on articles from 2023 to the first half of 2024. The first analysis yielded five topic groups, while the second resulted in six. These findings provide insights into the evolving research landscape and potential shifts in PQC focus.
With the emergence of quantum computers, classical cryptography is facing significant challenges. Address this compelling problem, it is the need of hour to develop Post Quantum cryptography (PQC), or quantum-resistant cryptography. PQC is a rapidly evolving field in computer science. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) posted a call for inviting new generation of PQC algorithms. This paper aims to explore the significance and relevance of PQC in the future. Performing bibliometric analysis is important for gathering the necessary information about this discipline. Performance analysis and science mapping are done to extract valuable insights from the dataset. The dataset includes 14,230 records extracted from the Scopus database. The analysis is done using qualitative as well as quantitative approaches. The quantity approach focuses on the number of publications and document type analysis of the publications, while the quality approach includes the citation analysis of research publications. Bibliographic coupling is also carried out to understand the relationship in a visualisation format between authors, documents, sources, and countries. After performing the analysis, it has been observed that China has made the most significant contribution to the field of PQC. Additionally, the most highly cited author identified is Nicolas Gisin from the University of Geneva. This study provides valuable insights into prominent keywords, emerging trends and key research areas within the PQC domain, offering a comprehensive overview of the current research landscape.
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is under development to guard against the threats of quantum computers by implementing a new class of cryptosystems. In this direction, much work has been done since 2006, which has led to many publications. Hence, this study presents an overview of PQC research through scientometric analysis of the data containing 1611 publications published from 2006 to 2023, retrieved from the Scopus database. The analysis identifies growth, trends, leading countries, and significant publications, providing insights into impactful PQC research. It also demonstrates a significant rise in publications after 2015, and the United States is a highly productive country. Furthermore, this study also discusses the managerial view, which can assist technology managers in understanding its impact on global and local markets. The findings of this analysis can be a valuable resource for researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders interested in the future of cryptography and other potential impacts of quantum computing.
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) provides the essential cryptographic algorithms needed to secure digital networking systems against future adversaries equipped with quantum computing. This paper reviews the PQC research landscape and identifies open challenges and future directions for the critical transition to PQC in digital networking systems. Building on the NIST standardization process which has hardened the PQC cipher algorithm security, this paper analyzes and describes the recent research on PQC implementations and integrations into scalable and standardized networking systems (Internet, web and cellular networks). We review research on the security, side-channel threats, performances, overheads, and compatibility of PQC ciphers. We also study the research incorporating PQC into the standardized web and cellular networking protocols, ranging from testing the PQC feasibility to proposing protocol solutions and mechanisms to enable PQC. Our study highlights the PQC challenge of large parameter sizes, common across the PQC cipher algorithms, and the research proposing protocol- and system-level mechanisms to address them. Informed by the survey, this paper identifies and highlights the research gaps and future directions to facilitate further research and development for PQC and to secure next-generation digital networking systems.
Information security is a fundamental and urgent issue in the digital transformation era. Cryptographic techniques and digital signatures have been applied to protect and authenticate relevant information. However, with the advent of quantum computers and quantum algorithms, classical cryptographic techniques have been in danger of collapsing because quantum computers can solve complex problems in polynomial time. Stemming from that risk, researchers worldwide have stepped up research on post-quantum algorithms to resist attack by quantum computers. In this review paper, we survey studies in recent years on post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and provide statistics on the number and content of publications, including a literature overview, detailed explanations of the most common methods so far, current implementation status, implementation comparisons, and discussion on future work. These studies focused on essential public cryptography techniques and digital signature schemes, and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched a competition to select the best candidate for the expected standard. Recent studies have practically implemented the public key encryption/key encapsulation mechanism (PKE/KEM) and digital signature schemes on different hardware platforms and applied various optimization measures based on other criteria. Along with the increasing number of scientific publications, the recent trend of PQC research is increasingly evident and is the general trend in the cryptography industry. The movement opens up a promising avenue for researchers in public key cryptography and digital signatures, especially on algorithms selected by NIST.
The accelerated pace of development in the Field of Quantum Computing is very alarming for many of the presently used cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and ECC underlying much of security in the modern world. This is an indication that the need for development of quantum-resistant algorithms especially for security in data integrity and communication in the environment driven by quantum computers, commonly referred to as Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). For addressing this, the Research presents a scientometric lenses on PQC to provide a systematic review of its related research terrain, thematic trends and key contributors for directionality purposes. In the scientific aspect, the work uses new-generation scientometric techniques, including co-words, thematic maps, and network diagrams based on 2874 articles sourced from the WoS and SCOPUS databases, which were systematically evaluated using the PRISMA protocol in R Studio. Such an approach could help disentangle the publication profiles, collaborative structures, and emergent institutionalization of PQC research. Identified insights demonstrate that the growth pattern of PQC has become steeper, with the number of annual publications reaching 623 in 2023, where Florida Atlantic University and Tsinghua University are also the most active institutions. Despite this progress, major research gaps persist, particularly in scaling PQC algorithms, cross-platform adaptability, and testing in real-world settings, which are essential for applications in constrained environments like IoT networks. Thus, this study sets a foundation of reference on PQC research and presents noble advice to scholars, legislators, and entrepreneurs. These findings make the case for constant development and reliable procedures to safeguard computational assets from new forms of attack posed by quantum computing and, in doing so, point to an exciting future in the post-quantum world.
Quantum computing provides the pathway to dismantle the security provided by cryptography especially classical public-key systems due to the emergence of Shor’s algorithm. This emerging threat necessitates the development of new security paradigms that are quantum-resistant. Consequently, two new approaches have emerged as prominent solutions, namely Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), which relies on quantum mechanical principles for security, and Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), which relies on classical cryptography for quantum resistance. This paper presents an extensive analysis of the global research trends in quantum cryptography and post-quantum cryptographic algorithms by incorporating the use of both bibliometric analysis and comparative analysis. The paper relies on a dataset collected from the Web of Science database from 2010 to 2025. The findings of the paper demonstrate an increase in scientific production in the field of quantum cryptography, with post-quantum cryptography emerging as a new dominant area coinciding with standardization by NIST, whereas quantum key distribution continues to evolve with new developments in quantum communication.