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France's Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027
(postquantum.com)
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by Sami_Lehtinen
by Sami_Lehtinen
The concern is systems which won't be resistant against quantum cryptographic attacks.
The US's NIST has an explainer page, "Post-Quantum Cryptography PQC":
Once it gets to be "later" where the harvest data is able to be decrypted, I guess will have decent enough LLMs to summarize all of that data? Otherwise, there's going to be such a huge back log to make it not too useful
I work at AWS, where we have been deploying Post-Quantum Cryptography for quite some time and have experts. We're making easier than ever, but the sudden changes in deadlines do make me wonder how many companies are going to have to spend more time than they'd planned on migrations and settings. The "context switch" of working on PQ can be quite expensive. Most tech people have no idea what ML-KEM, ML-DSA, or HQC are, or how to not worry about SHA, HMAC, or AES. It's going to be a ride!
The assumption that you care about this is baked into ANSSI certifications, otherwise you would usually not bother certifying your product. They warned in 2022 that they would do this (See Phase 2: https://messervices.cyber.gouv.fr/guides/en-anssi-views-post...) and will allow PQC-only algorithm no earlier than 2030.
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YAGNI - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it
Even regions with few quakes may have a history of large quakes. The New Madrid region (southern Illinois, southeastern Missouri, southwestern Kentucky, northwestern Tennessee, northeastern Arkansas) doesn't experience especially frequent temblors, but when they do occur, they're doozies:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1811%E2%80%931812_New_Madrid_e...>
The potential risks of PQC are large enough that preemptive countermeasures seem prudent.
So this isn't preparing for earthquakes, this is preparing for fairies and elves.
"Fairies and elves" suggest it's impossible. It isn't impossible, just very difficult. I'm here in bed conversing with someone on the other side of the world with a hand held device. The would have been "Fairies and elves" 50 years ago.
The security industry loves to use belt and belt and braces and braces and braces. If they add an extra belt or two, I doubt anyone will remark on it at all.
1. https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-quantum-roadmap/ 2. https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...
The increase in complexity is a huge problem. It is arguably justifiable but simultaneously concerning. It's already quite hard to make a correct TLS implementation as it is.
(Personally though, I still like post quantum encryption. It's a nice hedge in case ECC and/or RSA do fall any time soon, whether by quantum computer or simply math.)
The problem with PQC is not that nobody knows when a CRQC (cryptographically relevant quantum computer) will appear, but that by the time it appears, you are already ~10 years too late for migrating (5 years of migration time and 5 years of your adversary silently storing all your classical crypto messages to decrypt them at a later time, the "harvest now decrypt later" attack).
Of course the HNDL attack is only relevant for the most critical pieces of infrastructures, 99% of companies are not a real target for that, especially given the storage cost of such an attack.
There is also the "trust now, forge later" attack, in which a CRQC could break a chain of trust (i.e. digital signatures), and that attack does not need any storage besides the logs of past messages. If you want to guarantee authenticity and unforgeability of your logs for, say, 20 years, you better hope that no CRQC appears by 2050 at least. Once again, it only concerns maybe 1% of companies.
But hey, these 1% companies are exactly the ones that are needing specialised crypto equipment so the move from ANSSI tracks.
I personally do not believe a CRQC will appear before 2050 either. I am willing to bet some money on it, despite researchers in quantum computers being quite confident it will appear in the next 15 years, but I am not willing to bet the entirety of Internet security on it.
But, something to keep in mind: AI caught a lot of us by surprise. I used to pass through circles of AI developers, and I never thought I'd have an AI coding agent 15 years later.
In your opinion, what chance of QC would warrant PQC migration? Would you be ok with a 20% chance of everyone being caught unprepared? 30%? 50%?
Keep in mind the impact is "hackers can take control of almost all online infrastructure and forge almost any document".
I hate to be that guy, but I'm 52 now and I've been hearing about how Quantum Computing is going to revolutionise everything in the next two years, since I was in primary school and ZX81s were state-of-the-art.
At least a couple of manufacturers offered a practical and afforable(-ish) transputer-based system in the 80s that you could have actually gone out and bought.
The thing is we have nearly no idea when an invention is going to occur. We are horrifically bad at predicting it.
They were going to revolutionise absolutely everything to do with computing in just a couple of years, some 40 years ago.
I've been hearing the same thing about quantum computing for about as long.
I will take "Post Quantum Cryptography" seriously when I can buy a quantum microprocessor off the shelf.
Bullshit, unless you were listening to raving crackpots, and probably not even if you were.
The people worried about this now are not raving crackpots.
The funny thing is there's, for the foreseeable future (decades), no viable QCs at all expect breaking non-QC cryptography.
And should breaking non-QC cryptography become even remotely possible, the effect is going to be that everything is going to shift, like SSH, to an hybrid solution with two algos: good old non-QC resistant algo and new fancy QC-resistant algo.
So basically QC will have achieved jack shit besides moving everybody to use two algos instead of one.
In 2060 you'll have one device able to use quantum computing to break some messages from 2030, incriminating old senile or long dead politicians, that nobody will give any shit about.
That's the weirdest thing about this whole thing: the only viable QC we hear about is "breaking cryptography" but as soon as that becomes a possibility, we'll all be moving (just like TFA and OpenSSH are showing btw) to QC-resistant algos.
Making QC non-viable.
So... Besides cracking old obsolete message, what the heck can QC be used for?
I mean: what good are those machines going to bring the world, besides cracking old messages nobody cares about and besides making every switch to QC-resistant schemes (like hybrid old+new algos)?
As you noted the problems they pose for cryptography can be addressed with PQC. Military/Defense/National Security invests in them for the cryptographic applications (and probably also for the logistics applications), but they are only about 1/3 of the investment.
The rest is for the doing better physics simulations and for logistics and financial applications. The physics simulations will be huge and drug development and materials science.
From yesterday's posts: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983610> (my comment on the Romanian land registry hacking thread).
But it's also very possible that hypothetical report was genuinely concerning. We just haven't seen it or anything like it.
However I'm pretty firmly in the "quantum computing won't be doing anything useful any time soon, if ever" camp, so that definitely colors my opinions. I don't have any particular recent expertise to support that, but I did used to share an office with some serious QC people and go to their talks so... make of my words what you will.
Because right now my attitudes are trained by things like this https://algassert.com/post/2500 that explain just why 15 was factored in that famous run of Shor's algorithm and not, say, 21; and why 21 hasn't been factored yet and isn't likely to be any time soon....
Not because we expect a workable quantum computer by 2030 (current estimates are around 2035-2040), but because stuff survives for decades in large enterprises (especially if it touches hardware in any way. Think OT, think controllers for all kinds of machines).
Now that PQC is standardized, there's no gain not to demand it (it's basically a demand to use a current openSSL/libreSSL/$library), but not demanding it now will cause a major headache once/if quantum computers work.
TLS connection speed matter only for a very tiny niche of applications; those will choose according to their needs. For the general case, it just doesn't matter.
If your threat model includes store-now-decrypt-later, you should have been demanding PQC for years.
You mean the opposite. PQC-free will be blocked, so by 2030 all products will be PQC qualified.
That prep doesn't extend to building standards for higher magnitude quakes.
Appropriate prep is still important for a possible credible threat, even if it is likely to be a rare issue, and the magnitude of that prep differs by personal posture and exposure.
It's like worrying about reinforcing the barn wall in front of you against komodo dragons when the other three walls of the barn are missing.
A cursory google still seems to indicate people are using these things to learn how a hypothetical QC could be used in practice, rather than actually doing stuff in production or anything close to it.
> Despite the limitations in size and speed of today’s quantum computers, our algorithm provides quantifiable liquidity savings when applied to the Canadian HVPS using a 30-day sample of transaction data. By reordering batches of 70 payments, we achieve an average of Canadian (C) $240 million in daily liquidity savings, with a settlement delay of approximately 90 seconds
It has to be noted that the technology used (quantum annealing) is at best erm disputed, and that the company DWave has made very wild claims in the past. Also note that many "quantum speedups" have been de-quantumized, i.e. classical algorithms with equal or even better performance have been developed, sometimes by drawing inspiration from the quantum algorithm. Quantum supremacy is still quite unclear.
Now, could the problems we are talking about be efficiently solved on a classical computer? Maybe. But if nobody knows how to do it, we might just as well use the quantum computer.
Which is to say: even when PQC mitigations against QC are available, I expect a target-rich environment for QC attackers.
While I can assume these tools do a decent job at crypto asset discovery (a `grep -r "-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----"` is not the hardest product to design), I have no idea what to do for code scanning. CBOMkit and friends do not scan C code, which we actually need.
For instance, breaking RSA or ECDSA is requiring much fewer logical qubits than previously thought, and thus fewer physical qubits as well. Progress in error codes, quantum processing etc. made it that in 2019, it was estimated we needed ~20 million noisy qubits to factor RSA 2048. In 2025, we know we need fewer than 1 million. [0]. Some other papers even claim the need of 1000 physical qubits but they rely on a very exotic architecture so I would not consider them feasible.
Progress on the hardware is also continuing, see [1]. Researchers managed to have functional-ish error correction for the first time last year, and experts in the topic are confident that a cryptographically relevant computer will appear in around 15 years.
I personally am less optimistic than the experts (admittedly I am not an expert either), but there is enough activity to get worried for critical infrastructure.
Regarding the factoring issue, as you point out factoring 15 and factoring 21 are two very different tasks. The first one can be used to show that your quantum computer is indeed doing quantum computation; the second will prove that you have a functional error correcting code. If you can factor 21, it is probably only a matter of months/maybe a few years until you factor RSA 2048. As Scott Aaronson said [3], "Once you understand quantum fault-tolerance, asking “so when are you going to factor 35 with Shor’s algorithm?” becomes sort of like asking the Manhattan Project physicists in 1943, “so when are you going to produce at least a small nuclear explosion?”"
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15917
[1] https://sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_landscape
[2] https://globalriskinstitute.org/publication/quantum-threat-t...