Post-Quantum Cryptography | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Today’s encrypted data, such as credentials, may no longer remain confidential in the future because the public-key cryptography protecting it will soon be broken by quantum computers. Although no machine today can break elliptic curve cryptography or RSA, quantum hardware is advancing rapidly and will inevitably change how organizations protect their data. Ciphertext and credentials captured by attackers can now be stored and decrypted as soon as quantum computing catches up. How urgent is quantum-resistant cryptography? The Global Risk Institute’s 2025 Quantum Threat Timeline report shows that surveyed security specialists believe a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is likely to be available within 15 years, with 51-70% indicating so. The threat dates back to 1994, when Peter Shor proved that a powerful quantum computer could efficiently factor large numbers and compute discrete logarithms. However, Shor’s algorithm applies to public-key cryptography, posing no meani...

President Trump signed an  executive order on June 22  setting hard deadlines for federal agencies to move high-value assets and high-impact systems to post-quantum cryptography. Key establishment must move by December 31, 2030; digital signatures by December 31, 2031. EO 14409 leaves national security systems on a separate track. The deadlines matter because of a threat that does not need a working quantum computer today. Adversaries can collect encrypted U.S. data now and decrypt it later, once a large-scale quantum machine exists, the risk is known as  "harvest now, decrypt later" . The order describes that risk directly and pulls the government's PQC timeline forward by four to five years. The prior government-wide target, set by the 2022 National Security Memorandum 10, ran to 2035. The two deadlines line up with the standards NIST  finalized in August 2024 . Key establishment uses FIPS 203, the ML-KEM algorithm formerly called CRYSTALS-Kyber. D...

Google has announced a new program in its Chrome browser to ensure that HTTPS certificates are secure against the future risk posed by quantum computers . "To ensure the scalability and efficiency of the ecosystem, Chrome has no immediate plan to add traditional X.509 certificates containing post-quantum cryptography to the Chrome Root Store ," the Chrome Secure Web and Networking Team said . "Instead, Chrome, in collaboration with other partners, is developing an evolution of HTTPS certificates based on Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs), currently in development in the PLANTS working group." As Cloudflare explains, MTC is a proposal for the next generation of the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to secure the internet that aims to reduce the number of public keys and signatures in the TLS handshake to the bare minimum required. Under this model, a Certification Authority (CA) signs a single 'Tree Head' representing potentially millions of certi...

Google Cloud has announced quantum-safe digital signatures in Google Cloud Key Management Service ( Cloud KMS ) for software-based keys as a way to bulletproof encryption systems against the threat posed by cryptographically-relevant quantum computers. The feature, currently in preview, coexists with the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards, the final versions of which were formalized in August 2024. "Our Cloud KMS PQC roadmap includes support for the NIST post-quantum cryptography standards (FIPS 203, FIPS 204, FIPS 205, and future standards), in both software (Cloud KMS) and hardware (Cloud HSM)," the company's cloud division noted . "This can help customers perform quantum-safe key import and key exchange, encryption and decryption operations, and digital signature creation." The tech giant said its underlying software implementations of these standards – FIPS 203 (aka ML-KEM), FIPS 204 ...