Modern cryptology is currently at the confluence of two major streams in science, mathematics, and computing. The first stream is the projected arrival of quantum computing technologies at a scale which is large enough to render the current cryptographic standards insecure. Massive engineering challenges remain to be solved before we reach such an era. The community, however, has been embarking in the tasks of designing and rigorously testing quantum-secure cryptographic protocols. Most candidates rely on intractable problems in coding theory, lattices, hash functions, or multilinear maps. A close scrutiny on their respective theory and deployments, both in softwares and hardwares, provides diverse topics of possible research directions to pursue. Many of them will be long-term enough for PhD research work and for an institute-wide effort as well as regional or international collaboration.
