A Blockchain-Based Modular Architecture for Managing Multiple and Quantum-Safe Encryption Algorithms

The development of Quantum Computing has brought great advantages in terms of computational power that can be seen as an opportunity or as a potential threat to currently implemented systems. The security of a platform can be easily broken if its founding algorithms are not quantum-safe. For this reason, it is crucial to understand how quantum computers work and how much time is needed to switch to quantum-safe platforms. The main contribution of this paper consists of a software architecture for modular Blockchains to let multiple encryption algorithms coexist in order to mine new quantum-safe blocks without discarding old, validated, quantum-broken ones. Old blocks will still be unsafe for post-quantum cryptography, but this is not a threat to the chain integrity.