We’re in the middle of a profound shift – the migration of the Internet to secure, quantum-resilient cryptography. In many ways, it’s the single biggest change since the adoption of HTTPS, but while that transition was a 25-year battle of human incentives (requiring site operators to buy expensive certificates, forcing browsers to label ‘not secure’ warnings, etc.), this transition is just as profound, but much smoother, and much quieter.
In a new blog, PQShield’s Kris Kwiatkowski explains the development of the IETF Standard for Post-Quantum Key Exchange in TLS 1.3, now RFC 10024. This standard, co-authored by Kris, officially standardizes how web browsers, servers, apps and operating systems perform post-quantum hybrid encryption over TLS – essentially the technology that provides secure communication, the padlock in your web browser.
The standard formalizes three specific hybrid key exchange algorithms, combining classical encryption (for example, X25519) with post-quantum ML-KEM (FIPS 203). Hybridizing traditional elliptic curves by combining the technology with lattice-based PQC is a smart approach that has already proven resilient – preventing user data from being compromised in 2022 during the sudden collapse SIKE. More recently we saw the danger of relying purely on young mathematics AI cryptanalysis threatened the post-quantum signature algorithm, HAWK. As Kris brilliantly puts it:
“The curve insures against the newness of the lattice, and the lattice insures against the physics of the curve.”
The revolution continues. While this quiet shift in confidentiality (key agreement) is a major breakthrough, the next frontier is active authentication via digital signatures. Migrating certificates to post-quantum ML-DSA (FIPS 204) is likely to be much more difficult, especially with the end of the decade now in sight and quantum roadmaps shortening. As with many milestones, they not only show you just how far you’ve come, but also remind you of the road ahead.
RFC 10024 is just nine pages, but of course, the story of its standardization spans thousands of IETF debates, the unseen battleground for Internet security. If you’d like to understand how complex math actually becomes global infrastructure, we highly recommend reading Kris’s full breakdown here.