Every CISO I talk to right now is juggling two deadlines that feel unrelated and aren’t. One is the slow-motion arrival of quantum computers capable of breaking the public-key cryptography that underpins basically everything — TLS, SSH, JWTs, code-signing. The other is the much faster arrival of AI-assisted coding tools that are shipping security-critical code nobody has fully reviewed. I used to think of these as separate beats. I don’t anymore, because the same root failure shows up in both: organizations adopting powerful new capability faster than they’re building the visibility and discipline to govern it.
Post-Quantum Planning: The Inventory Problem Comes First
NIST finalized its first three post-quantum cryptography standards on August 13, 2024, after an eight-year, multi-round public competition: FIPS 203 (ML-KEM, the lattice-based key encapsulation mechanism formerly known as Kyber), FIPS 204 (ML-DSA, the signature scheme formerly known as Dilithium), and FIPS 205 (SLH-DSA, the hash-based fallback formerly known as SPHINCS+). In March 2025, NIST added a fourth algorithm, HQC, specifically chosen because it rests on a different mathematical hardness assumption than the lattice problems underneath ML-KEM and ML-DSA — a deliberate hedge in case lattice-based cryptography turns out to have a weakness nobody’s found yet. The NSA’s CNSA 2.0 guidance sets 2030 as the mandatory PQC migration deadline for national security systems, and NIST’s broader timeline calls for deprecating RSA and ECDSA entirely by 2035.
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