On August 24, 2023, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published initial public drafts of three Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) for post-quantum cryptography and opened a public comment period through November 22, 2023. The three drafts were FIPS 203, specifying the Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM); FIPS 204, specifying the Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm (ML-DSA); and FIPS 205, specifying the Stateless Hash-Based Digital Signature Algorithm (SLH-DSA).
According to the Federal Register notice, these proposed standards specified key establishment and digital signature schemes designed to resist future attacks by quantum computers. Each algorithm was derived from a different submission to the NIST PQC Standardization Project: CRYSTALS-KYBER, CRYSTALS-Dilithium, and SPHINCS+, respectively.
NIST received dozens of comment submissions across the three drafts from U.S. federal agencies, foreign government agencies, private-sector organizations, and academic researchers. A fourth draft standard based on the FALCON algorithm (FIPS 206) was planned for release in 2024.