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What changed in post-quantum cryptography, who it affects, and what to do about it. Standards, mandates, breaks, and shipping implementations, read against the primary source.
9 articles
Check Point Research disclosed that the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group used ML-KEM, the NIST-standardized post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism, to protect the delivery channel for a Windows kernel zero-day (CVE-2026-68820) in its Operation Dream Job campaign against defense and aviation firms. Microsoft patched the flaw in its August 2026 Patch Tuesday release, the only bug that month it flagged as actively exploited. The notable part is not quantum computers, it is that a well-reviewed, standardized primitive is now common enough that attackers reach for it too.
The IETF has published RFC 10024, formally standardizing X25519MLKEM768, SecP256r1MLKEM768, and SecP384r1MLKEM1024 as hybrid post-quantum key agreement mechanisms for TLS 1.3. The three groups replace the long-running draft-ietf-tls-ecdhe-mlkem specification that browsers and libraries were already shipping as a de facto default. Here is what the RFC locks in, and what it still leaves for a separate migration.
Cloudflare now supports post-quantum authentication between its edge and your origin server: Authenticated Origin Pulls and Custom Origin Trust Store both accept ML-DSA (FIPS 204) certificates. Paired with the X25519MLKEM768 key exchange already running on that hop, this is the first mainstream path to a fully post-quantum CDN-to-origin connection, not just the browser-to-edge leg.
On July 28, 2026, Anthropic disclosed that its Claude Mythos Preview model found a structural weakness in HAWK, a lattice-based signature scheme in the third round of NIST's additional-signatures process. The flaw cut the estimated key-recovery cost for the smallest parameter set by roughly a million times, and the HAWK team withdrew the candidate days later. None of NIST's finalized standards, ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA, are affected.
Go 1.27, released this month, adds a crypto/mldsa package implementing ML-DSA (FIPS 204), plus ML-DSA support in crypto/x509 and crypto/tls. Post-quantum signatures are no longer a third-party dependency for Go services, they are a standard-library import. Here is what shipped and what it means for the migration.
By late 2025, around 43% of human web connections to Cloudflare were already using hybrid post-quantum key agreement, and X25519MLKEM768 is on by default in every major browser. The browser-to-edge hop is largely migrated. The unfinished half is origins, authentication, and your own stack. Here is where the line actually is.
Chrome has negotiated hybrid post-quantum key agreement by default since version 131 in November 2024, migrating from a pre-standard Kyber draft to the finalized X25519MLKEM768. The other major browsers and libraries followed. Here is how the switch happened, and what the hybrid does and does not protect.
NIST's transition report, IR 8547, names the dates the whole migration is timed against: today's public-key algorithms deprecated after 2030 and disallowed after 2035. Those are not distant abstractions, they are a schedule you have to work backwards from. Here is what the deadlines say and what they mean.
CISA, with the NSA, FBI, and international partners, replaced the 2021 NTIA baseline for what a software bill of materials must contain. The new floor asks for cryptographic hashes on every component, a signature on the SBOM itself, full transitive-dependency depth, and machine-processable identifiers, and it applies to open-source, AI software, and SaaS. Here is what changed, why it was done, and why it lands next to the cryptographic bill of materials we build.
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