Post-quantum readiness

Selected third-party guidance, tools and implementation perspectives that complement the QURKI Signal Post-quantum readiness is not a cryptography project.

The Signal interprets the board, trust, supplier and organisational implications of the transition. These resources go further into planning, technical discovery, supplier engagement, crypto agility, transition design and implementation.

Inclusion means the resource appears relevant and worth considering. It does not imply that QURKI endorses every assumption, recommendation, product or methodology it contains. Organisations should apply the material in light of their own information, obligations, operating environment and jurisdiction.

Core guidance

Timelines for migration to post-quantum cryptography

Publisher and provenance: UK National Cyber Security Centre — government guidance.

Best for: Technical decision-makers, risk owners, large organisations, critical infrastructure and organisations with bespoke or long-lived systems.

What it adds: A clear 2028/2031/2035 planning horizon; discovery, prioritisation and migration activities; technology-maturity considerations; and distinctions among sectors and asset types.

Limitations: Written from a UK national-policy and assurance perspective. The dates provide an organising horizon, not a universal prediction or a complete organisation-specific plan.

Planning for post-quantum cryptography

Publisher and provenance: Australian Signals Directorate — government guidance.

Best for: Organisations beginning risk-based planning or needing a concise structure for locating, assessing, triaging, implementing and communicating the transition.

What it adds: Australian 2026/2028/2030 milestones; prioritisation of critical systems, long-lived confidential data and difficult-to-update assets; and a practical sequence for transition planning.

Limitations: Reflects Australian government cryptographic policy and ASD-approved approaches. Its milestones should be interpreted against the organisation’s own jurisdiction, asset lives and dependencies.

Post-quantum questions to ask your vendors

Publisher and provenance: Australian Signals Directorate — government, vendor-neutral guidance.

Best for: Cyber leaders, procurement teams, vendor managers and technical stakeholders assessing third-party products and services.

What it adds: Structured questions covering embedded cryptography, hardware roots of trust, firmware and secure boot, standards-based implementation, performance, rollback, roadmaps, contracts and communication.

Limitations: It is deliberately extensive. Organisations are not expected to ask every question of every supplier; the questions need to be applied proportionately to materiality and supplier control.

Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography — resource hub and FAQ

Publisher and provenance: US National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence — government applied-cybersecurity programme.

Best for: Technical leaders and programme teams needing a living gateway to standards, inventory, risk management, interoperability, benchmarking, sector material and implementation examples.

What it adds: A regularly updated map of migration phases and resources, including NIST workstreams on cryptographic visibility and interoperability testing.

Limitations: The hub is broad and includes links to vendor tools and commercial material alongside government and standards sources. It is a resource directory and technical programme, not a curated board view.

The PQC Migration Handbook

Publisher and provenance: AIVD, CWI and TNO — Dutch government and national research organisations. TNO is a not-for-profit applied-research organisation that also provides commissioned research, migration support and consultancy.

Best for: Teams ready for a detailed treatment of preparation, planning, cryptographic choices, execution, risk and migration strategy.

What it adds: A substantial handbook, practical migration experience, application-specific considerations and the PQChoiceAssistant decision aid.

Limitations: Detailed and technical. It reflects a Dutch and European assurance context, and one contributing organisation also offers related services. It should be read as public-interest research guidance, not as wholly detached from implementation practice.

Additional perspectives

Considerations for Achieving Crypto Agility: Strategies and Practices

Publisher and provenance: US National Institute of Standards and Technology — government technical guidance.

Best for: Architects, security leaders and product teams considering how systems can replace or adapt cryptographic algorithms while preserving security and operations.

What it adds: A rigorous definition of crypto agility, existing design approaches, strategic considerations, trade-offs and areas requiring further work.

Limitations: Crypto agility reduces the cost and disruption of algorithm change; it does not by itself establish that replacement mechanisms will preserve every privacy, interoperability, performance or service property.

Next steps in preparing for post-quantum cryptography

Publisher and provenance: UK National Cyber Security Centre — government technical guidance. Companion primary sources below show where other authorities and standards bodies take different or complementary positions on hybrid transition.

Best for: Security architects, product and infrastructure teams deciding whether post-quantum/traditional hybrid designs are justified during migration and how to retain a path to post-quantum-only operation.

What it adds: A practical explanation of why hybrid designs may sometimes be used for interoperability, implementation security or protocol constraints. It also distinguishes general-purpose lattice-based signatures from hash-based signatures that rely on different security assumptions.

QURKI note: Hybridisation and diversity among post-quantum algorithm families are different forms of transition resilience. Combining a classical and post-quantum algorithm can hedge against a weakness in a newer post-quantum algorithm or implementation while the classical component remains secure. Once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer can break the classical component, that part of the hedge no longer provides independent protection. Using post-quantum algorithms based on different mathematical assumptions provides another form of diversity. Neither approach substitutes for crypto agility.

Guidance is not uniform: ANSSI strongly recommends hybridisation in the short and medium term and requires it in its regulated perimeter. ASD does not recommend but does not prohibit post-quantum/traditional hybrids, noting both the resilience benefit and the added complexity, computation and bandwidth overhead. The NCSC treats hybridisation as an interim design that may be justified by interoperability, implementation-security or protocol constraints and should preserve a path to post-quantum-only operation.

Companion primary sources: IETF RFC 9794 — Terminology for Post-Quantum Traditional Hybrid Schemes; IETF LAMPS — Composite ML-DSA; ANSSI — FAQ sur la cryptographie post-quantique; ASD — Guidelines for cryptography; NIST — first three finalized PQC standards; and Keyfactor EJBCA 9.5 release notes, which document an implementation of composite certificates combining ML-DSA with RSA, ECDSA or EdDSA.

Limitations: Hybrid arrangements add implementation, maintenance, performance and bandwidth complexity and create an additional future migration step to post-quantum-only operation. The IETF Composite ML-DSA specification is still an Internet-Draft rather than a final RFC. This collection does not recommend that every organisation deploy hybrid signatures; jurisdictional guidance, assurance requirements and system constraints differ.

Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Roadmap

Publisher and provenance: Post-Quantum Cryptography Coalition, coordinated by MITRE — industry-coalition guidance. The coalition was founded by MITRE with IBM, Microsoft, PQShield, SandboxAQ and the University of Waterloo and includes a wide range of contributors.

Best for: CIOs, CISOs and programme teams wanting a tailorable roadmap and supporting inventory workbook.

What it adds: A reusable progression through preparation, baseline understanding, planning, execution, monitoring and evaluation.

Limitations: It reflects a coalition of technology and security participants, including vendors. Its programme structure can organise the work but should not be mistaken for evidence that the organisation is learning, reducing exposure or preserving value.

Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration at Meta: Framework, Lessons, and Takeaways

Publisher and provenance: Meta — operator-led company case study.

Best for: Leaders and practitioners wanting to see how one large technology platform has approached prioritisation, inventory, external dependencies, maturity levels, performance, guardrails and staged deployment.

What it adds: Concrete operating experience; explicit attention to performance and user experience; recognition that some required primitives and dependencies are not yet available; practical distinctions among awareness, readiness, hardening and deployment; and an example of hybridisation being used as a transition safety net in some integrations.

Limitations: Meta’s scale, centralised engineering environment, cryptographic expertise and influence over suppliers are not representative of most organisations. The framework is one company’s approach, not general or independent guidance.