Federal 100: Lily Lidong Chen
Name: Lily Lidong Chen
Title:Manager, Cryptographic Technology Group, IT Laboratory
Agency: National Institute of Standards and Technology
Future-proofing cryptography. If quantum computers break today’s encryption, a stronger scheme will be at hand thanks to Chen. As architect of NIST’s post-quantum cryptography efforts, she is searching for standards that will render brute-force attacks by quantum machines ineffective. After calling for algorithms that can resist both quantum and conventional attacks, Chen and her team selected 69 from a field of 82 and then narrowed the semifinalists to 26. Donna Dodson, NIST’s chief cybersecurity adviser, calls Chen a world-class cryptographer and said her work “will ensure the U.S. has strong cryptographic security controls to protect our digital information and infrastructure.”