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CategoryAll
Smart search ranks by meaning as well as keywords (one row per story, last 45 days).
Post-quantum cryptography adoption and the national security implications
Opinion analysis argues quantum computing favors nation-state espionage, leaving lagging post-quantum adoption at critical infrastructure exposed to harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks.
A CSO Online opinion piece argues that the extreme cost and infrastructure requirements of quantum computers will concentrate cryptographically relevant quantum capability among nation-states and a few corporations, favoring espionage and economic espionage over criminal monetization. It highlights harvest-now-decrypt-later risk to long-lived secrets, expert warnings such as Filippo Valsorda's, and diverging CRQC timelines with Google suggesting possibly 2029. The piece predicts governments, banks, and targeted sectors will adopt PQC first while utilities, small hospitals, and local government lag, widening exploitable gaps in critical infrastructure reminiscent of Salt Typhoon-style access.
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A Global Readiness and Sovereignty Capability Model for Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration
Researchers propose a Readiness-Sovereignty Capability Model scoring 57 countries on post-quantum cryptography readiness and sovereignty.
The RSCM model decomposes cryptographic sovereignty into indigenous capacity, indigenous post-quantum control, and external dependency, with a gate requiring demonstrated creation in at least one core layer. Applied to 57 documented cryptographic actors, 20 countries clear the maker gate (15 full-stack, 5 research makers), 11 hold strong general capacity without post-quantum control, and 25 are dependent. Readiness correlates with independent cyber indices up to rank correlation 0.70, while post-quantum creation shows no significant correlation with commitment (0.22).
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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.
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Google Cloud Targets 2027 for First Major Post-Quantum Security Milestone
Google Cloud set 2027 for its first major post-quantum cryptography milestone to counter store-now-decrypt-later risks, migrating through 2028.
Google Cloud announced a post-quantum cryptography roadmap targeting its first major security milestone in 2027. The plan aims to mitigate store-now-decrypt-later harvest risks, with wider migration goals extending through 2028. The roadmap affects cryptographic protections for Google Cloud services and customer migration planning timelines.
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Lazarus Used Post-Quantum Key Exchange to Deliver Zero-Day
Lazarus used a post-quantum key exchange to shield delivery of a Windows zero-day exploit, adding stealth to its campaign.
North Korean Lazarus Group malware used a post-quantum key exchange to protect the delivery of a Windows zero-day exploit. The technique adds a layer of stealth to the campaign's initial access, complicating detection and traffic inspection. It signals growing APT adoption of post-quantum cryptography in offensive operations.
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EFI Pairs Without One-Way Puzzles: Oracle Separations from Communication Complexity
Theorists build a classical oracle where one-way puzzles fail yet EFI pairs survive, separating two candidate minimal assumptions of quantum cryptography.
The paper constructs a single classical oracle relative to which one-way puzzles do not exist, even with an unbounded verifier, while an EFI pair survives every classical-query distinguisher holding advice, making one superposition query at the end. Security is proven by reducing adversary knowledge to communication complexity for Vector-in-Subspace, with the superposition query bounded using random matrix theory. Relative to the oracle, quantum polynomial time offers no advantage on tasks with classical inputs and outputs and there is no proof of quantumness, separating the leading minimal assumptions of quantum cryptography.
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Future-Proofing the Internet: Akamai Achieves End-to-End PQC
Akamai says it achieved end-to-end post-quantum cryptography across its network to future-proof internet traffic.
Akamai announced it has achieved end-to-end post-quantum cryptography (PQC) across its services. The company frames the move as future-proofing the internet against quantum decryption threats. No article text was available; details are limited to the announcement title.
Akamai Blog40
Optimizing Credential Blast Radius Through Trust Boundaries and Delegation Under Post-Quantum Authentication Costs
Academic paper models credential blast radius optimization across trust domains under post-quantum latency costs, cutting expected impact by up to 36%.
The paper formulates the joint selection of trust domains and credential-derivation structures under policy and latency constraints as an NP-hard optimization problem, showing the scalarized two-domain direct-issuance case reduces to a weighted minimum cut. In 195 of 230 exhaustive synthetic comparisons, joint optimization produced lower credential blast radius than choosing boundaries first, especially under chained delegation. A trace-derived replay using measured post-quantum authentication costs found the best design reduced expected impact by up to 36% relative to a single domain within the latency budget.
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The G7 tells industry to hurry up and prep for post-quantum encryption
A G7 working group report urges governments and industry to accelerate post-quantum cryptography migration, framing quantum risk as a near-term economic threat.
A cybersecurity working group formed at the June 2026 G7 Summit in France called on organizations to stop postponing migration of critical systems to post-quantum cryptography, warning that harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks against currently encrypted data exist today. The report was signed by CISA, the UK NCSC, France's ANSSI, Germany's BSI, Canada's CSE, Japan's NCO, and Italy's ACN. It also cautions that some NIST-selected PQC algorithms have already been broken on classical computers, reinforcing support for crypto-agility. The push aligns with a recent US executive order moving federal PQC migration timelines from 2035 to 2030, while Google and others target 2029.
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Post-quantum migration gets harder when every user holds a key
Quantus CEO Christopher Smith discusses post-quantum migration pitfalls, including oversized keys breaking IPsec, SSH and TLS, and hard-to-migrate blockchain user keys.
Quantus CEO Christopher Smith describes post-quantum migration findings from banks and hospitals, including forgotten default passwords, orphaned admin keys held by former employees and hidden password hashes on user devices. Larger post-quantum keys and signatures break size assumptions in IPsec, SSH, TLS and libp2p, while migrating blockchain user keys remains hard because every user must act. He argues boards should fund quantum migration like insurance by quantifying cryptographic failure risk, and warns a silent quantum break would be difficult to detect from outside.
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Preparing for the Post-Quantum Era: A Call to Action
CISA and the G7 Cyber Security Working Group urge organizations to begin post-quantum cryptography migration, outlining five transition priorities.
CISA and the G7 Cyber Security Working Group jointly released "Preparing for the Post-Quantum Era: A Call to Action". The document urges governments and organizations to begin migrating sensitive data, authentication systems, and critical assets to post-quantum cryptography against emerging quantum computing threats. It defines five priorities: raising quantum-risk awareness, national PQC strategies, quantum-safe R&D, public-private partnerships, and integrating PQC into cybersecurity requirements and procurement.
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Nearly half of enterprises have no one leading PQC migration
Axiad survey finds 46% of enterprises lack a single leader for post-quantum cryptography migration despite most maintaining cryptographic inventories.
Axiad research on post-quantum cryptography (PQC) readiness found 75% of respondents maintain continuously updated inventories of certificates, keys, and algorithms, but 46% have no single person owning the migration. About half have never formally assessed whether public-facing infrastructure supports post-quantum key exchange. 67% said the harvest-now-decrypt-later threat is an active priority, with competing priorities, budget constraints, and lack of regulatory guidance cited as top obstacles; executives were more confident than PKI practitioners.
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Why a cryptographic inventory is key for addressing the quantum computing threat
Tenable argues organizations need cryptographic inventories and phased plans to counter harvest-now-decrypt-later quantum attacks.
Tenable's blog warns that quantum computers will eventually break current public-key cryptographic algorithms, and that "harvest now, decrypt later" collection makes the risk operational today. It recommends building a comprehensive cryptographic inventory and executing a phased operational strategy to migrate toward quantum-resistant protection for stored and transmitted data.
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Hardware Fingerprinting FTQC via Quantum Decoder Timing
Quantum decoder timing on IBM Heron processors forms a side channel enabling device fingerprinting with 89% accuracy and workload inference.
The work demonstrates that wall-clock syndrome-decoding times on fault-tolerant quantum computers constitute a novel hardware side channel. Using per-shot decoder timings from three IBM Heron processors collected over 68 days, a passive observer can reconstruct detector-firing distributions, estimate logical error rate, infer code distance, and fingerprint the specific device with up to 89% accuracy versus 33% for random guessing. Noisy simulation based on Google's 105-qubit Willow processor distinguishes nine surface-code patches at 81% accuracy, showing the channel persists across vendors and code families.
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GAUGE: A Formal Framework for Measuring Cryptographic Security under Heterogeneous Adversary Cost Models
GAUGE frames cryptographic security as profiles over adversary cost models, certifying a ranking reversal between ML-KEM-512 and AES-128 from a 4–5% memory pricing shift.
GAUGE represents cryptographic security as a function over admissible adversary cost models (a security profile), proves profiles are piecewise-linear and concave, and establishes a rating trilemma when two profiles cross. A polynomial-time linear-programming procedure certifies whether the ranking of two schemes is robust, reverses under admissible models, or is genuinely incomparable. Applied to NIST post-quantum standards, the framework certifies a ML-KEM-512 versus AES-128 ranking reversal from a 4–5% shift in memory pricing and measures lattice-sieving cost drift of 9.79 bits per year over eight years. A hybrid X25519 + ML-KEM-768 handshake reduces combined-break probability twenty-fold at a 2.3 kilobyte cost.
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Certifying Adversarial Robustness of Quantum Classifiers under Known-Readout Query Access
Framework certifies adversarial robustness of quantum classifiers using only measurement statistics and finite-shot outcomes, demonstrated on IBM Quantum hardware.
The paper introduces a measurement-only certification framework for adversarial robustness of quantum classifiers under known-readout query access, requiring no tomography, parameters, or gradients. It returns a lower bound ruling out untargeted errors within a radius and an attack-independent upper bound witnessing an adversarial state, both estimable with finite-sample guarantees. Evaluations show the lower bound tracks exact optima on tractable instances while the upper bound stays informative when standard attacks fail. The method was validated on IBM Quantum hardware using 40 executions of two 8-qubit quantum neural networks.
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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.
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1.1.1.1 now supports post-quantum DNSSEC, all 2,420 bytes of it
Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 resolver now validates post-quantum DNSSEC signatures using ML-DSA-44, a 2,420-byte NIST algorithm, preparing DNS for post-quantum migration by 2029.
Cloudflare enabled 1.1.1.1 to validate DNSSEC signatures using ML-DSA-44 (algorithm 18), a NIST-standardized post-quantum signature with 1,312-byte public keys and 2,420-byte signatures, roughly 38x larger than ECDSA P-256. The large signatures exceed common DNS-over-UDP limits, forcing fallback to TCP and creating downgrade risks while conventional algorithms must be published alongside. Cloudflare cites the risk of a quantum computer breaking RSA/ECDSA signatures by 2030 and plans full post-quantum security by 2029.
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Observational Indistinguishability and Integrity Blind Regions in Hybrid Quantum-Classical Workflows
Framework formalizes integrity blind regions in hybrid quantum-classical workflows, validated across 3,600 label interventions with conformal detection rules.
The paper presents a claim-relative evidence and reference framework for integrity of hybrid quantum-classical workflows, distinguishing structural blind regions caused by observational indistinguishability from finite-batch statistical misses. Experiments over 3,600 label interventions show exact label-path invariance for feature and prediction views. The geometry-aligned construction detects 343 of 2,700 conclusion-changing interventions using the conformal rule and 1,183 of 2,700 with the uncorrected union, with executed conformal clean false-action rates of 0.048-0.059.
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Securing quantum error correction against misleading advice from AI agents
Researchers design calibration-based certified checks that let quantum error-correction systems safely reject harmful recovery updates proposed by compromised AI advisers.
The paper shows that opposite coherent X rotations in an odd-distance square toric code yield identical passive syndrome histories, creating ambiguity an AI adviser could exploit to recommend harmful recovery updates. It introduces terminal logical measurements on calibration states plus an independent evaluator that accepts updates only when calibration uncertainty and drift bounds certify improvement. Simulated advice attacks showed calibration-confidence checks reject harmful proposals while retaining most beneficial updates, and the authors derive sufficient limits on calibration age.
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Operational Roles of QRNG-Derived Quantum Entropy in Bitcoin Proof-of-Work Architectures
arXiv study finds quantum-random entropy adds no Bitcoin PoW success advantage but helps assurance in fault and provenance scenarios.
The paper shows replacing classical entropy with QRNG output does not change honest Bitcoin proof-of-work success probability when candidate headers remain distinct. It introduces a reproducible benchmark measuring an entropy-efficiency factor and a reboot-diversity index, finding QRNG value only in assurance-oriented scenarios involving correlated restart faults, namespace reuse, and entropy provenance. Validation is simulation-based, with hardware-in-the-loop testing identified as future work.
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Witness Encryption via Prime-Order Generic Groups
Unconditional witness encryption construction for NP in the generic-group model, plus first superconstant NP-hardness result for homogeneous MinRank.
A cryptography paper unconditionally constructs witness encryption for NP in the classical generic-group model using an ordinary cyclic group of prime order. For SAT instances of size n, encryption and decryption run in poly(n) time with correctness error 2^-n^Ω(1), while generic adversaries making n^Θ(log n) queries achieve at most n^-Θ(log n) distinguishing advantage. It also proves the first superconstant-factor NP-hardness of approximation for homogeneous MinRank under randomized reductions.
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