How Cybersecurity Vendors Are Preparing for the Post - Quantum Era

For most security teams, quantum computing has lived comfortably in the "future threats” column. That future is now fast approaching and the vendors that protect today's networks will need to prove they can protect tomorrow's too. The potential deadline for Q-Day, the hypothetical future moment when quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard public-key cryptography, including RSA and elliptic-curve (ECC) algorithms, has been moved up from 2035 to potentially happening by 2030. This makes it more urgent for organizations to transition from the current, potentially vulnerable, cryptographic algorithms we use today to encrypt all digital communications and authentication certificates to ones that are certified robust against quantum-powered attacks. One of the main threats is called ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ (HNDL) and refers to attackers collecting valuable data (code, personally identifiable information…) in an encrypted form now in order to decrypt it with quantum compute when it is available. Governments are now stepping up post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration mandates timeline to ensure their most critical organizations are using ‘quantum safe’ encryption algorithms – some of which (ML-KEM, ML-DSA and HLS-DSA) have been standardized by the US National Institute of Technology and Standards (NIST) in August 2024. In the US, the…