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3 stories in the last 30d

Automatic Key Exchange: faster, post-quantum secure origin handshakes for 45 billion daily connections (and counting)

Cloudflare's Automatic Key Exchange probes origins to lead with preferred key exchange, cutting HelloRetryRequests from 52% to 3.7% and enabling automatic post-quantum origin connections.

Cloudflare announced Automatic Key Exchange, an extension of Automatic SSL/TLS that probes each origin's supported key agreement algorithms and leads with the preferred one, favoring the post-quantum hybrid X25519MLKEM768. Rollover across roughly 45 billion daily origin connections cut HelloRetryRequests from about 52% to 3.7%, saving more than 150 ms of p90 handshake latency. Hundreds of thousands of domains now receive post-quantum origin connections without manual configuration, supporting Cloudflare's goal of quantum-safe encryption by 2029 to counter harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks.

Cloudflare Blog · 8d agoResearch

Getting ahead of ‘harvest-now-decrypt-later’: Post-quantum cryptography planning

Opinion piece urges organizations to begin post-quantum cryptography migration now, citing harvest-now-decrypt-later risk and NIST deadlines.

CSO Online outlines why harvest-now-decrypt-later makes long-lived sensitive data a current risk even before quantum computers exist. It cites NIST IR 8547 timelines deprecating RSA-2048 and ECC P-256 by 2030 and removing them by 2035, finalized FIPS standards ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA, upcoming FN-DSA (FIPS 206), NSA requirements for national security systems from 2027, and UK NCSC phased guidance through 2035. The author recommends cryptographic discovery, crypto-agility, and prioritizing long-confidentiality data and TLS endpoints.

CSO Online · 7d agoResearch

Dependency-Aware ROM/CBD Correctness Bounds for ML-KEM-768 at the Heuristic Failure Scale

Researchers certify a dependency-preserving upper bound of 2^-164.81 on honest decapsulation failure for ML-KEM-768 within an explicit ROM/CBD abstraction.

The paper models ML-KEM-768's domain-separated public-matrix streams as independent uniform ring elements and secret polynomials as CBD2 primitives, explicitly not claiming an information-theoretic result about the fixed SHAKE instantiation in FIPS 203. It preserves dependencies from the public matrix and both ciphertext-compression terms, using a graph-coupled reference, a proper-ideal bivariate Fourier transport, and a 256-coordinate union bound. The certified bound is Pr[K' != K] <= 2^-164.81, with the exponent 164.8107162... exceeding the 164.81 threshold by only about 0.0007162 bits; 164.82 is not certified. The bound applies to messages fixed independently of the randomness under honest encryption and decapsulation, and is not an exact DFR, a fixed-SHAKE equivalence, or a new IND-CCA reduction.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch1