In Crypto a hot topic is something called hash functions. After the devastating attacks of Chinese researchers on the current hash standards (SHA1) in 2004 and 2005, there is an urgent need to come up with new hash standards that will survive at least the next 20 years. In January 2007, NIST issued a preliminary call for submission. NIST and international crypto community are now working to define the terms and evaluation criteria for the final call for hash functions. Although the preliminary call did not mention any details, it is reasonable to expect that hash functions, whose security should be guaranteed for more than 20 years, should also be secure against quantum attacks.

In general, there is a emerging trend in Cryptography in which the cryptographic primitives are designed to survive not only the classical attacks but also the quantum ones. The resistance of crypto algorithms against the quantum attacks may be quite expensive (if the implementation is done using classical algorithms) and therefore, may not be too attractive for practical implementations. Nevertheless, it is interesting research problem to find out what mathematical/algebraic structure could be useful for high-security applications (that survive q-attacks and perhaps can be implemented efficiently using q-algorithms or even better classical algorithms).