Post-quantum guides, by what you need to do

A cryptographic inventory is a complete, current map of every algorithm, key, certificate, protocol, and library in your estate, plus where each is used and what data it protects. Why it is the mandatory first step of any PQC migration, how to build one, and how CBOM keeps it alive instead of stale.

A post-quantum readiness assessment is a breadth-first evaluation of how prepared your organization is to migrate, turning a vague sense of quantum risk into a scored, prioritized baseline. What it evaluates, how it differs from a full technical audit, and what you get out of it.

The practical hunt for RSA, Diffie–Hellman, and elliptic-curve schemes across source, dependencies, certificates, and live traffic: what actually counts as vulnerable, the detection methods, their blind spots, and how findings converge into one machine-readable inventory.

How to turn a cryptographic inventory into a prioritized, deadline-aware migration plan: the five phases, how to sequence by data shelf life rather than by ease, and how to roll out hybrids without breaking production.

A practical walkthrough of moving TLS 1.3 to X25519MLKEM768 hybrid key exchange: what changes on the wire, where support already exists, the handshake-size cost, and how to roll it out without breaking classical clients.

NIST standardised two post-quantum signature schemes with very different trade-offs. Which one to use where, why SLH-DSA exists at all, and the sizes that decide it.

How to turn on hybrid post-quantum key exchange (X25519MLKEM768), why modern stacks may already have it, the config that silently disables it, and the middlebox failure to expect.

Replacing classical key establishment with ML-KEM is more than a TLS change: key exchange lives in SSH, VPNs, email, messaging, and data at rest. What actually changes, hybrid vs pure, and how to stage the migration without stranding half your estate on classical crypto.

The concrete patterns that make an algorithm a replaceable component: runtime negotiation, a provider abstraction, config-driven selection, self-describing versioned formats, size-agnostic storage, and automated rotation. The engineering behind agility, not the argument for it.

Regulators publish dated deadlines for retiring classical cryptography; most CI gates only catch new findings. How a policy-as-code mandate gate evaluates your whole estate against CNSA 2.0 or NIST IR 8547's calendar (warning after the deprecate date, failing after the disallow date), and why a regulatory deadline cannot be baselined away.

Passing NIST's ACVP known-answer vectors, conforming to FIPS 203/204/205, and passing a security audit are three different things. What the KATs miss, how conformance testing actually works, and why an audited, popular library is not evidence of conformance.

The concrete checks a conformant ML-KEM implementation must pass: §7.2/§7.3 input validation, implicit rejection, exact sizes and encoding, versioning and adversarial vectors, as a checklist you can run against any library.

"ACVP-tested," "conformant," and "FIPS 140-3 validated" are three different claims that answer three different questions. What each one covers, what it silently leaves out, and how to ask which axis a vendor's assurance really lives on.

A QuantaKrypto attestation is a post-quantum-signed, independently checkable record of a project's cryptographic posture. It is what turns the self-reported score in a crypto-agility.json manifest into evidence. Here is what it contains, how it is signed, and the exact steps to verify one yourself, without trusting us.

RSA in plain language: what it does, why multiplying two primes protects anything, what a 2048-bit key really means, and why a quantum computer undoes all of it. With commands to generate a key on your own machine.

Elliptic curve cryptography in plain language: why a 256-bit ECC key replaced a 3072-bit RSA key, what ECDH and ECDSA each do, which curve to pick, and why a quantum computer breaks ECC before it breaks RSA.

ML-KEM in plain language: what a key encapsulation mechanism is, why it never encrypts your message, which parameter set to pick, what it costs in bytes, and how to generate a key and run an encapsulation yourself.

ML-DSA in plain language: what a digital signature proves, why the post-quantum version is fifty times bigger, which parameter set to pick, where the size actually hurts, and how to sign and verify something yourself.

Why a quantum computer that does not yet exist is already a problem for data you send today, and how to reason about which of your secrets are actually at risk. The threat model, the maths of the exposure window, and where to start.

Crypto-agility is the property that lets you replace a cryptographic algorithm without re-architecting the system around it. What it means concretely, the anti-patterns that block it, and why it is the real deliverable of a post-quantum migration.

The whole picture in one read: what a quantum computer actually breaks, what it leaves alone, the NIST standards that replace the broken parts, the deadlines that make it a program and not a project, and where to start. The on-ramp to everything else.

Why post-quantum deployments run a classical curve and a PQ KEM together and derive the session key from both, so the connection survives a quantum break of the curve or an undiscovered flaw in the young algorithm. How the combiner works, where hybrids are used, and when pure PQC is preferred instead.

A side-by-side of RSA and ECDH against ML-KEM: the hardness assumptions Shor's algorithm breaks, the encapsulate/decapsulate message pattern, key and ciphertext sizes, and performance, so you know exactly what changes in your systems, and what ML-KEM does not replace.

The X + Y > Z inequality that decides whether a given secret is exposed to harvest-now-decrypt-later: what each term means, how to estimate them honestly, and how to turn the result into a per-system migration priority.