Post-quantum cryptography is not a future problem: Is your organisation ready?

For 25 years, organisation's secure connections have been protected by RSA and ECC algorithms without anyone thinking about the underlying cryptography. However, this is about to change with the finalisation of new post-quantum cryptography standards by NIST in August 2024. These standards, including ML-KEM for key establishment and ML-DSA, FN-DSA, and SLH-DSA for digital signatures, are not experimental technologies but the quantum-resistant successors to the RSA and ECC algorithms that currently secure TLS certificates, code signing, and email encryption.

The urgency of this transition has been accelerated by the White House's Executive Order 14409, which has pushed the US federal government's migration deadline from 2035 to 2031. Both the government and private sectors are now under pressure to start planning for this transition much sooner than anticipated.

South African organisations are not immune to this shift. With customers, partners, and regulators increasingly expecting alignment with global security standards, the need for post-quantum readiness is becoming a business resilience priority. The threat of "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks, where data is intercepted and stored with the expectation of decrypting it in the future, highlights the vulnerability of encrypted data under classical algorithms.

This threat is not limited by geography and can affect data captured anywhere in the world. The urgency of this migration is further compounded by the fact that data encrypted with RSA-2048 or ECC-256 this year could be vulnerable for decades, as these algorithms are expected to be broken by quantum computers even before they become available.

The White House's Executive Order 14409 has prioritised key establishment over digital signatures, recognizing that the protection of sensitive data for extended periods is a more pressing concern. A forged signature is a real-time attack that cannot be retroactively forged, unlike data that can be decrypted later. Local threat landscapes, such as the high volume of ransomware detections in South Africa, underscore the need for organisations to adopt more efficient and secure methods for managing certificates and cryptographic assets.

Traditional approaches are no longer viable given the scale of the migration required. Merkle Tree Certificates present a solution by batching certificates and signing summaries, which significantly reduces the size of the signatures and makes the transition to post-quantum cryptography more manageable. These certificates are expected to be available from certificate authorities starting in 2027.

However, migrating to this new system is complex and requires comprehensive identification and replacement of every certificate and cryptographic asset across various ecosystems. Certificate life cycle management automation is essential to handle the scale of this migration effectively.