CRYSTALS-Dilithium:
The Future of Digital Signatures

Digital signatures are the backbone of trust in the digital world. They authenticate software updates, secure financial transactions, and verify identities across the internet. CRYSTALS-Dilithium represents the next generation of digital signature algorithms, designed to remain secure even against quantum computer attacks.

How Dilithium Works

Dilithium is a lattice-based signature scheme that derives its security from the hardness of the Module Learning With Errors (MLWE) problem. Unlike RSA or ECDSA, which rely on integer factorization or discrete logarithms (both vulnerable to quantum attacks), lattice problems remain computationally hard even for quantum computers.

The algorithm works through three main operations:

• Key Generation: Creates a public-private key pair based on random polynomial matrices
• Signing: Produces a signature using the private key and a hash of the message
• Verification: Confirms the signature's validity using only the public key and message

Security Levels

Dilithium offers three parameter sets corresponding to different security levels:

For most applications, Dilithium3 provides an excellent balance of security and performance. It's what we use at H33 for quantum-resistant authentication.

Performance Benchmarks

One of Dilithium's strengths is its impressive performance. On modern hardware (AWS Graviton4, Neoverse V2, ARM NEON optimizations), our February 2026 benchmarks show:

• Key generation: 36.6µs
• Signing: 45.0µs
• Verification: 36.9µs
• Full sign+verify cycle: ~82µs
• Pool keygen (pre-generated): 0.35µs (104x speedup)

These speeds make Dilithium suitable for high-throughput applications. At H33, we achieve 82µs for a complete sign-and-verify cycle, enabling real-time authentication at scale. With our key pool architecture, we can achieve 2.86M signature operations per second on a single 64-core node.

Implementation Considerations

When implementing Dilithium, keep these factors in mind:

• Key sizes: Public keys are 1,952 bytes (Dilithium3), larger than classical algorithms but manageable
• Signature sizes: 3,293 bytes, requiring consideration for bandwidth-constrained applications
• Side-channel protection: Use constant-time implementations to prevent timing attacks
• Random number generation: Dilithium requires high-quality randomness; use cryptographically secure RNGs

Code Example

// Quantum-resistant signing with H33
const keys = await h33.quantum.generateKeyPair({
  algorithm: 'dilithium3'
});

const signature = await h33.quantum.sign({
  data: document,
  privateKey: keys.privateKey
});

const isValid = await h33.quantum.verify({
  data: document,
  signature: signature,
  publicKey: keys.publicKey
});

Migration from Classical Signatures

If you're currently using RSA or ECDSA, consider a hybrid approach during migration. Sign documents with both classical and Dilithium signatures, allowing systems to verify with either. This provides backwards compatibility while establishing quantum resistance.

CRYSTALS-Dilithium is the future of digital signatures. With NIST standardization complete, now is the time to begin integrating this quantum-resistant algorithm into your security infrastructure.