Podcast
Root Causes 611: Merkle Tree Certificates, What and Why


Hosted by
Tim Callan
Chief Compliance Officer
Jason Soroko
Fellow
Original broadcast date
April 29, 2026
There are strong reasons to believe that the architecture of PQC TLS will take the form of Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC). We are joined by post quantum cryptography expert Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare as he explains this new PKI architecture, how it works, and why we need it. We define new concepts like landmark certificates and log mirrors and discuss what's necessary to move to this new architecture.

