Start here.
Five minutes to the version of post-quantum cryptography that matters operationally.
Most public PQC content explains qubits. This page does not. It explains what the standards are, why they matter to you in 2026, and where to go next based on your role. Five minutes. No qubits.
The collection is already happening.
The most urgent threat is not a future event. Nation-state adversaries and sophisticated criminal networks are harvesting encrypted data today and storing it, waiting for the day a sufficiently powerful quantum computer allows them to read it. The strategy has a name: Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL). Anything transmitted over the internet today, protected only by classical encryption, may already be in an adversary's archive.
The decisive question is not when a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC) arrives. The decisive question is the confidentiality lifetime of the data you are protecting. If your data must remain confidential for five or more years — which includes most strategically sensitive business information, most regulated personal data, and most state secrets — it is effectively at risk today, not at some theoretical future date.
Where to go next
- For the editorial framing. Read the deretti.net opener — "PQC is not a quantum problem".
- For the structured analysis. Read the Active Research note on Post-Quantum Cryptographic Exposure.
The math is finished. The migration is not.
NIST's National Institute of Standards and Technology finalized three new post-quantum standards in August 2024. FIPS 203 standardizes ML-KEM for key establishment (the operation that protects TLS, VPN, and any session-setup handshake). FIPS 204 standardizes ML-DSA for general-purpose digital signatures (certificates, JWTs, document signing). FIPS 205 standardizes SLH-DSA — a hash-based, stateless signature scheme — for conservative long-lived signing where algorithm diversity matters most (root CAs, firmware, code signing).
The standards are stable. The procurement signal is not. CISA's January 2026 product-category guidance gives procurement teams an agency-backed framework to prefer PQC-capable products in cloud, browser, endpoint, and networking categories. CNSA 2.0 — NSA's Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite — requires National Security Systems to prefer PQC by January 2027, disallow classical key establishment by 2030, and disallow classical signatures by 2031. Mid-market operators are not bound by CNSA 2.0 directly, but the procurement landscape is shaped by it.
Where to go next
- For the operator-level summary. See Foundation: Standards & Timelines.
- For the audience-tier translation. Pick a briefing for your role.
Inventory. Sequence. Pressure vendors.
For most operators below hyperscaler scale, the work is not cryptographic implementation. The work is a cryptographic inventory, a priority sequence based on data longevity and external exposure, and pressure on vendors to deliver PQC-ready products on a timeline that beats the CNSA 2.0 inflection. Hybrid key exchange (a classical KEM combined with ML-KEM in parallel) is the standard deployment posture during the transition — it gives quantum protection without dropping backward compatibility.
Most working registers for mid-market organizations contain about forty rows, sorted into three priority tiers. P1 is long-lived data on internet-facing high-trust systems (CA, VPN, code-signing, identity federation) — usually five to fifteen rows. P2 is everything internet-facing that does not meet the P1 criteria. P3 is internal-only and short-lived. The register is a living document, not a snapshot, because cryptography is embedded in libraries, middleware, hardware, and cloud services that are independently updated by different teams and vendors.
Where to go next
- For the conversation in your organization. Pick the briefing that matches the room.
- For the operator artifacts. See Tools (coming in Phase 2 — inventory worksheet, vendor RFP rubric, maturity self-assessment, tabletop scenario, executive one-pager).
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
The PQC migration is a multi-year discipline, not a procurement event. Begin with the briefing that matches your role and the conversation you have to have today. The rest of the section is reference material that will still be here next quarter.