Root Causes Podcast

Recent announcements from Google and Cloudflare have declared new 2029 deadlines for full post quantum cryptography (PQC) migration. Bas Westerbaan explains the rationale behind Cloudflare's decision and discusses implications for other enterprises., asking "Are you a gambler?"

Repeat guest Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare joins us to explore the role of Merkle Tree Certificates in private CA scenarios with an eye toward where they will be needed and where traditional PKI will be better suited.

The US-based X9 financial industry consortium has created a server certificate. We explain what X9 certificates are and suitable use cases for this certificate type.

Dustin Moody of NIST joins us to discuss Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC) and the NIST position on them.

Repeat guest Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare joins us to explain the PLANTS working group in IETF, which is driving standards around post quantum cryptography (PQC) and Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC). Bas explains the path to becoming a final standard, where we are in this process, and how you can get involved.

It's reasonable to believe that Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC) and traditional RSA will co-exist on the same servers for years, if not decades, during the transition to post quantum cryptography (PQC). Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare joins us in this episode to explore the possibility of quantum downgrade attacks and what we can do about them.

We are joined by Dustin Moody of NIST to go over the current state of the various post quantum cryptography (PQC) contests, including upcoming FIPS standards for Falcon (FN-DSA) and HQC, other Round 4 algorithms, the digital signing algorithm (DSA) On Ramp, isogeny, and future cryptographic exploration.

We are joined by Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare to explain considerations and requirements for use of Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC). This includes full adoption of TLS 1.3, offering PQC and RSA at the same time, the imperative value of automation, and running production MTC in 2027.

There are strong reasons to believe that the architecture of PQC TLS will take the form of Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC). Post quantum cryptography expert Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare explains this new PKI architecture, how it works, and why we need it.

We describe three different kinds of logical qubits with their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Jason explains the extreme danger of side channel attacks in the new post quantum cryptography (PQC) era.

The reliability of cryptographic algorithms is largely a matter of conjecture based on track record. Proving security is impaired by the difficulty of formal verification, implementation weaknesses, and failure in randomness.

The first of the five pillars of Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) is discovery. While many of your certificates are easily discoverable, some difficult PKI remains.

The UK Online Safety Act intends to force vendors who sell hardware and software to allow the government to scan end-to-end encrypted communication on end devices. 

Google has taken a strong position supporting Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC) as the PQC-enabled future for SSL / TLS.

A new paper from Google Quantum AI and others documents a new technique for breaking ECC, particularly the curve protecting crypto currencies, smart contracts, and blockchain. This accelerates post quantum cryptography (PQC) timelines.

New research suggests that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is achievable with only 10,000 qubits. This was an important contributor to Google moving its PQC target to 2029.

Google has announced that it is moving its target for full PQC support to 2029. This is a strong statement from one of the most knowledgeable PQC technology companies that the existing 2030 target is too late.