As 2025 ended and we look back on what we managed to do together and how we’ve grown as a company, I wanted to share a recap of the Research Team’s year. And honestly: this has been one of those years where the outputs weren’t just “good on paper”, but really carried through into visibility, influence, and concrete momentum towards real-world PQC deployment.
2025 highlights in numbersTo start with the headline results (which still feel a little surreal when written down in one place): we had 24 papers accepted in top-tier conferences, and among them we were honoured to receive a Distinguished Paper Award at CCS. That’s a huge recognition of the quality and relevance of the work and a credit to everyone who contributed to getting it over the line. PQShield’s research team is truly playing in the same league as the best research institutes and universities in the world!Alongside publications, we also put significant energy into sharing our work and building community presence, with 8 talks delivered over the year—including 3 at ICMC. That gave us a great platform to communicate not only results, but also the bigger picture: why this direction matters, how it fits into the broader post-quantum transition, and what comes next.On the programme and funding side, we continued to make strong progress and build long-term runway. The NEDO grant in Japan has been running throughout the year, providing sustained support and a clear thread of work that continues into 2026. We also had the great news that the EU RELATE grant was accepted, which means even more runway on the way to support our research on threshold constructions.Finally, one of the most meaningful ecosystem-facing outputs this year was our CRYPTREC report on ML-KEM, delivered as a whitepaper and intended to be used by Japanese officials and stakeholders as part of planning their national post-quantum transition. This is a strong example of research translating into real guidance at the policy and deployment level. Technical progress Numbers are important, but what’s been especially energising this year is that the work behind them has been tightly connected to the real direction of travel for post-quantum cryptography. We had several threads moving forward in ways that are both technically exciting and strategically important.We made solid progress on threshold constructions and advanced primitives including FHE, where the focus has been on pushing beyond theory into solutions that remain convincing under real operational constraints. In particular, we were the first to achieve a real threshold version of the ML-DSA standard! And thanks to the expertise and momentum built in this line of work, PQShield will be a leading force in the next NIST MPTC call.It has also been incredibly motivating to see Signal using our TripleRatchet protocol—because that kind of adoption raises the bar in the best possible way. It makes you think not only about correctness and security proofs, but also interoperability, edge cases, upgrade paths, and long-term maintainability. Real-world systems demand it—and it ultimately makes the research stronger.And while there is still more to do, we pushed forward on the direction of a post-quantum VPN, where the goal is not simply “PQC inside a tunnel”, but a migration-ready story that takes performance, deployment practicality, and hybrid transition realities seriously.We also continued to strengthen our formal verification efforts, contributing to the mlkem-libjade project through the development and use of EasyCrypt-based formal proofs, helping to rigorously establish correctness and security properties of ML-KEM implementations intended for real-world deployment.Last but definitely not least: it’s impossible not to mention the success story that has been the Aikido/Cisco development and implementation of low-memory, SCA-resilient ML-KEM / ML-DSA! I think everyone has heard about it—but one more time: thank you, and congratulations to everyone involved! In summaryTaken together, 2025 felt like a year where research outcomes consistently made contact with reality: award-winning publications, strong external visibility through talks, grants that extend the programme, and outputs including the CRYPTREC report that can help shape how PQ transition decisions are made in practice.This work required a lot of collaboration across teams and individuals, both inside and outside the company, and rather than trying to name everyone and inevitably missing someone important, I simply want to say thank you to all contributors for the technical work, the reviews, the discussions, and the steady support that made these outcomes possible. Really looking forward to building together on this momentum in 2026! 