On January 16, 2025, the Korean Post-Quantum Cryptography (KpqC) competition announced its final winners. Two key encapsulation mechanisms, SMAUG-T and NTRU+, and two digital signature schemes, HAETAE and AIMer, were selected through a national cryptographic evaluation process to meet domestic security policy requirements.
According to the KpqC competition website, the winners were chosen after three years of public evaluations, algorithm improvements, and security validations beginning in 2021. HAETAE is a lattice-based variant of NIST’s Dilithium signature using a more efficient rejection sampling technique. AIMer, developed jointly by Samsung SDS and KAIST, is a zero-knowledge-based signature scheme. SMAUG-T is a module-lattice KEM comparable to NIST’s Kyber, and NTRU+ is an enhanced variant of the NTRU lattice family. The selected algorithms differ from NIST’s PQC standards, establishing a sovereign Korean cryptographic toolkit.