This month, the White House released President Trump’s Cyber Strategy for America, representing a significant shift towards a much more resilient and aggressive cyber defense policy. It’s certainly timely: foreign governments and criminal networks are likely to increase cyber operations at scale, and financial cybercrime has grown sharply, with US systems and data as a major target. With heightened international tensions in play, the US is taking a proactive approach.
While the strategy reinforces President Trump’s ‘America First’ approach, the headline for tech manufacturers, vendors, and the supply chain is that there is an immediate commercial urgency for readiness against the threats of tomorrow – in particular, the quantum threat.
Critical infrastructure and the supply chain
A key pillar of the new strategy includes a focus on securing essential systems and supply chains – ‘in defense and CNI, energy, financial and telecommunication systems, data centers, water utilities, and hospitals‘. It’s interesting to note the ripple effect implied – this mandate also targets ‘adjacent vendors’ and private companies within these networks, not just the primary operators. In effect, it means manufacturers in the supply chain are likely to be highly scrutinized for the appropriate security standards – including quantum-ready cryptography integrated at every stage from design to deployment.
Locking out adversary-linked tech is of course, a natural move for this administration. The government is actively looking to create competitive procurement processes in order to ensure the best technology is available for procurement. Interestingly, it’s likely to result in manufacturers integrating PQC now in order to remain viable candidates for contracts requiring trusted providers. In other words, delaying PQC integration now is actually a direct hindrance to what’s likely to be a highly lucrative market.
Post-quantum, front and center
As an acceleration and continuation of previous guidance from the White House, the Cyber Strategy makes a commitment to the implementation of post-quantum cryptography, by mandating the modernization of federal systems. The administration is actively promoting PQC adoption as a critical tool for cyber security, alongside securing quantum computing itself, in the effort to ‘protect America’s intellectual advantage’.
The takeaway message is clearly that PQC is no longer theoretical best-practice. It has now become a foundational pillar of US federal procurement.
Manufacturers, software developers, ‘adjacent vendors’ to the supply chain must therefore, now accelerate their quantum-readiness roadmaps. This strategy makes clear that alignment with these new US procurement goals is an essential feature for the world of tomorrow.
To find out more about how PQShield could help, why not view our solution pages? We build ultra-secure, ultra-fast and ultra-small PQC IP that’s designed for hardware, software and the cloud, and we helped write the NIST standards that the USA now includes as its quantum-security baseline. It’s our mission to help the global technology supply chain stay quantum secure.
Author: Matthew Stubbs is a content engineer and technical author, with a background in optical physics and engineering. With a range of experience in many industries and technologies, Matt writes about cyberseurity, science and cryptography updates, managing PQShield’s content and providing technical insight to the latest developments.