This is a draft agenda and everything on it — including timings and room assignments — may still change as the programme comes together. Keep an eye on this page, or follow us on LinkedIn, for the latest updates.
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Event agenda
| Time Time AmsterdamYour time | Red hall | Blue hall | Room A (2) | Room B (5) | Room C (8) | Room D (9) | Room E (10) | Room F (6&7) |
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CET | Red hall OpeningWelcome to the 2026 PQC Conference. The chairs open the conference, set the agenda for the three days ahead, and invite some attending sponsors for a one-minute pitch (the only commercial message allowed at this conference). | |||||||
CET | Red hall To be announcedSession details will be announced soon. | |||||||
CET | Red hall The State of Quantum Computing in 2026Quantum computing has made substantial progress over the past few years, but it has also become increasingly difficult to tell which developments really matter. More qubits, better fidelities, demonstrations of error correction, new architectures, and increasingly sophisticated software all point toward a maturing field. At the same time, large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing remains an engineering challenge rather than an accomplished fact. This talk takes stock of where quantum computing stands in 2026, with a focus on the developments that are most relevant for scaling towards useful quantum computation. It looks at how recent progress fits into the broader trajectory of the field and where the main technical limitations still lie. AI has also entered this discussion. There are already meaningful ways in which machine learning and AI can help us design, control, compile, and operate quantum systems. The opposite direction, using quantum computers to improve AI, is much less settled. Separating these two directions is important for understanding where there is tangible progress and where expectations still run ahead of evidence. | |||||||
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CET | Red hall From Inventory to Action: A Risk-Based Scoring Model for Prioritizing PQC Migration at Enterprise ScaleMany enterprises have now begun cryptographic discovery and built Cryptographic Bills of Materials (CBOMs), only to find themselves facing a new problem: a list of tens of thousands, sometimes millions, of cryptographic artifacts with no clear way to decide what to remediate first. Inventory answers "what do we have?" but it doesn't answer "where do we start?" This session presents a practical, risk-based scoring model for prioritizing post-quantum migration at enterprise scale, developed and applied in a large organizational environment. Rather than treating all inventoried artifacts as equally urgent, the model scores each one against a set of factors: exposure (internet-facing vs. internal-only), data sensitivity classification (e.g., PCI, PII, PHI), the harvest-now-decrypt-later (HNDL) risk window based on data longevity relative to projected quantum timelines, the availability of a non-invasive remediation path, business criticality, and environmental readiness (including whether the underlying platform even supports the protocols required for migration, since gaps here can mean a hardware refresh rather than a configuration change). Attendees will see how these factors combine into a composite priority score, walk through worked examples showing how superficially similar systems can land in very different priority tiers, and examine the model's limits, which will include a deliberate, defensible "cost exceeds risk, do not migrate yet" decision point and how to document that decision for auditors and leadership rather than treating it as an oversight. The session will also cover the organizational friction this approach surfaces in practice: who owns the scoring process, how it integrates with existing GRC and risk functions, and what changes as quantum timelines and remediation costs shift over time. Attendees will leave with an adaptable scoring rubric, a set of questions to apply to their own CBOM data, and a framework for prioritizing migration work that can be defended to stakeholders, not just executed against a spreadsheet. | Blue hall Post-Quantum Migration at AndurilAnduril's post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration is well underway. Our particular focus is on the most constrained, most possibly complicated signals environments in which to establish secure, modern communications infrastructure. In this talk, I survey the technical roadmap of Anduril Industries from no-PQC to full-PQC, with special emphasis on DDIL (Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent, and Limited) communication scenarios. This talk discusses organizational challenges, engineering roadblocks (and successes), ranging from early planning and implementation, to simulation testing, live field testing, and deployment roll-out. A special emphasis is on interoperability of protocols and cryptographic primitives, and how to effectively handle various international regulation jurisdictions, as well as a call for further, future collaboration in this space, especially on common standards across various standardization bodies. | Room F (6&7) Roundtable: Securing Transportation for the Quantum EraAircraft, rolling stock, vehicles, and vessels stay in service for decades, so the cryptography designed into them today must hold well into the quantum era. Transportation systems also depend on long and complex supply chains: tier-one suppliers, chip vendors, onboard and backend PKI, charging and ground infrastructure, and standards set by many different bodies. Industry and regulators are now beginning to set expectations for the post-quantum transition. The open question is how to plan migrations for systems that cannot simply be patched. This roundtable brings together people from aviation, rail, automotive, mobility, shipping, and EV charging for a working discussion rather than a series of presentations. After a short introduction from the moderator, participants will compare where their organizations are starting in practice: cryptographic inventory across fleets and onboard systems, in-vehicle and onboard PKI, V2X and charging infrastructure, over-the-air and software updates, and the long-lived assets that will outlive today's algorithms. The discussion will give particular attention to the dependencies no single operator or manufacturer can resolve alone, from suppliers and chip vendors to certification and the timing of standards, and to what the sector needs from regulators to keep migration aligned across borders. The main conclusions will feed into a brief recap during the conference's closing session. | |||||
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| 5 min CET | Red hall Towards Coordinated Quantum Security in the Financial Sector: Risks, Priorities, and a Framework for Market ActionThe transition to quantum security in the financial sector is not only a technological undertaking, but also a coordination challenge for a highly interconnected global ecosystem. Misaligned transition efforts may create operational risks, including interoperability tensions across markets, infrastructures, and jurisdictions, prolonged reliance on quantum-vulnerable cryptography, inefficient duplication of effort, and ecosystem fragmentation. To address these risks, the Europol Quantum Safe Financial Forum, in collaboration with FS-ISAC and CFDIR, has proposed an operational framework for coordinated action. The framework focuses on identifying and prioritising critical use cases, structuring the transition through shared implementation waves, and defining three use-case-specific milestones to align sequencing and execution. This session examines that prioritisation framework and provides an update on the state of quantum security in the financial sector, relevant not only to financial sector professionals, but to the wider community as an early example of ecosystem-wide coordination and its associated challenges. | Blue hall Post-Quantum Security of IPsec / IKEv2IKEv2 is the key exchange protocol that drives IPsec, the enterprise workhorse VPN. In this talk, I will recap the standardization of extensions that allow us to use IPsec with post-quantum key exchange, and explain what features you need to turn on (or make sure to ask your suppliers for) to be secure against post-quantum adversaries, both for harvest-now decrypt-later and fully post-quantum adversaries. I will support these claims through a security analysis of IKEv2 and its extensions that we submitted to a major academic security conference. This talk is based on joint work with Benedikt Auerbach, Keitaro Hashimoto, and Shuichi Katsumata. | ||||||
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| 5 min CET | Red hall Business implications of the PQC transitionThis panel session will discuss the next phase of migration to Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC). As organizations move from discovery and strategy into their respective (but interconnected!) transition journeys, it is important that business continuity and interoperability be maintained throughout. This session will discuss strategic business factors that are important to consider for this transition and how industries can stay aligned. | Blue hall Where the PQC Migration Actually Stands: A Cross-Ecosystem Census of 2.8 Million PackagesThe NIST 2030 deprecation deadline for quantum-vulnerable public-key algorithms is 1,386 days away as of March 2026. Every PKI operator, certificate authority, and security team needs to know how the software supply chain they depend on is responding. No cross-ecosystem measurement existed. We built one. This session presents findings from the first cross-ecosystem cryptographic census, scanning 2,809,479 packages across 11 package ecosystems including npm, PyPI, Go, Maven, crates.io, NuGet, and others. The results reveal the actual state of PQC adoption in the open-source supply chain that PKI infrastructure depends on. Of the 2.8 million packages scanned, 108,145 use cryptographic libraries. Among those, 21,332 depend on weak or deprecated algorithms such as MD5, SHA-1, DES, and RC4. Only 188 packages, or 0.17 percent of crypto-using packages, have any post-quantum cryptography dependency. PQC adoption is concentrated in 5 of 11 ecosystems, with crates.io accounting for 58 percent of all PQC-dependent packages. Six ecosystems show zero PQC adoption. Maven has the worst weak crypto rate at 51.6 percent. Beyond the headline numbers, the talk addresses the migration gap that matters most for PKI operators. Dependency-level scanning, the foundation of most software composition analysis tools, misses approximately 4 times the cryptographic surface area visible to source-level analysis. We validated this gap on 20 production projects and found that 30 percent of projects with active cryptographic code show zero dependency-level signal. For PKI operators conducting cryptographic inventories under NIST IR 8547 or OMB M-23-02, this means current tooling systematically undercounts exposure. Attendees leave with three actionable outcomes: the current state of PQC adoption in their language ecosystem with named libraries and migration paths; a reproducible census methodology they can apply to internal package registries and vendor assessments; and a clear understanding of why dependency scanning alone fails for cryptographic inventory and what to do about it. All scanning tools, the 357-library classification catalog, the full scan dataset, and a live dashboard are released open source. | ||||||
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CET | Red hall What Breaks Between Assessment and Implementation: Lessons from PQC Migration Programs Across OrganizationsMost PQC migration advice stops at the roadmap. This session picks up where the roadmap meets production, drawing on assessment and migration work across many organizations in different sectors and at different levels of maturity. The recurring lesson is that the same failure points show up again and again, and that the gap is between a clean assessment, a practical roadmap, and successful implementation. The talk follows the real arc of a program. It starts with discovery and assessment, including what cryptographic inventory consistently misses: statically linked libraries, keys embedded in firmware, proprietary protocols on operational networks, and cryptography buried inside third-party appliances. It then moves to the migration attempt and the things that broke in production. Hybrid and composite certificates issued into mutual TLS meshes triggered chain validation errors in older OpenSSL and JSSE clients. Handshake sizes grew large enough to fail through middleboxes and load balancers. Hardware security module gaps for composite key generation surfaced only under load. The session walks through the rollback decision and the redesign that held, which was a parallel PQC hierarchy rather than swapping roots in place. The second half connects engineering reality to assurance reality, because the same programs hit a second wall: producing evidence auditors accept. It maps what examiners actually request against NIS2, DORA, and the CRA, including CBOMs as Article 21 documentation, certificate lifecycle reports for ICT risk testing, module attestations, and the supplier readiness evidence chain. The practical takeaway is to structure discovery and inventory output so it doubles as audit evidence from day one, rather than rebuilding it under deadline. Attendees will leave with the failure modes that recur regardless of sector, a clear signal for when to abandon in-place hybrid roots, and a sequence that links assessment, migration, and assurance so the three are not rebuilt separately. The content is experience-led and vendor-neutral, framed entirely around what was observed in the field. | Blue hall Beyond the Handshake: Enhancing PKI with Out-of-Band Key AgreementPost-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration is accelerating, but it also exposes a deeper reality: cryptography can no longer be treated as a one-time design choice embedded in protocols. As standards evolve, organizations must prepare for a future where multiple cryptographic assumptions coexist and continuously change, while advances in automation and AI shrink the window to respond to emerging cryptographic risks. This talk introduces Out-of-Band (OOB) Key Agreement as a practical way to enhance PKI, establishing an independent cryptographic control layer that complements existing protocols such as TLS and IPsec. Rather than replacing in-band key exchange, OOB mechanisms derive additional authenticated symmetric keys through a separate, policy-governed channel rooted in PKI identity, enabling organizations to introduce new cryptographic methods, rotate algorithms, and respond to emerging threats without requiring changes to application or transport layers. In this model, PKI evolves from a foundational trust anchor into a central orchestrator of cryptographic policy and lifecycle management across multiple key establishment channels, enabling both resilience through diversity and operational simplicity in a post-quantum world. | Room A (2) From Fear to Hybrid: Making PQC Less ScaryEuropean agencies such as ANSSI and BSI recommend the hybrid use of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms alongside traditional schemes, driven by concerns regarding the maturity and long-term security assurance of purely post-quantum solutions. This talk focuses on two prominent approaches to fulfilling this requirement through compound algorithms: the IETF's composite signatures and KEMs, as well as Intelligent Composed Algorithms. The original motivations behind each approach and their respective design decisions will be presented in detail, including the cryptographic construction and the security properties they aim to achieve. The advantages and drawbacks of both approaches will be examined, highlighting how they can contribute to crypto agility and how they differ from other hybridization concepts such as hybrid certificates or multiple signatures. The talk also addresses current interoperability considerations and implementation challenges. Finally, the state of standardization within the IETF and other relevant bodies will be reviewed, alongside existing support and an outlook on future work in the field of hybrid algorithms. | Room B (5) From ECDSA to Post-Quantum Signatures: Practical Lessons from Migrating Wallet-Based Transaction PKIMany post-quantum migration discussions focus on TLS, certificates, and enterprise PKI. A different but increasingly important case is wallet-based transaction infrastructure, where long-lived accounts, public-key exposure, signature verification, hardware constraints, recovery flows, and user experience all interact with cryptographic migration. This session presents practical lessons from designing and implementing a migration path from ECDSA-based transaction signing toward post-quantum signatures in an EVM-like blockchain environment. It focuses on architecture and engineering trade-offs rather than product claims: key generation and storage, address derivation, signature-size impact, transaction encoding, verification cost, backward compatibility, testnet strategy, smart-account and vault-based migration models, and how to avoid creating unsafe hybrid systems that merely add complexity without reducing risk. The talk also examines the relationship between blockchain wallet infrastructure and traditional PKI concepts: identity binding, certificate-like assertions, key lifecycle management, recovery, revocation, policy enforcement, auditability, and hardware-backed key protection. Special attention is given to migration patterns that allow existing assets or accounts to gain post-quantum authorization controls without assuming an overnight replacement of legacy systems. Attendees will leave with a concrete checklist for evaluating post-quantum readiness in transaction-signing systems: where classical signatures remain a dependency, which components need cryptographic agility, what must be measured before migration, and which design decisions can create operational or security risks during the transition. | Room C (8) You Can't Patch the Silicon: Post-Quantum Migration Realities in Automotive HSM and AUTOSAR Crypto StacksPost-quantum migration guidance is largely written for systems that can be patched in place: swap a TLS library, rotate a certificate authority, roll out a firmware update to a fleet of servers. Automotive embedded systems break almost every one of those assumptions, and this talk is a practitioner's account of what actually happens when you run a real PQC risk and migration assessment against an in-vehicle HSM and AUTOSAR crypto stack instead of a data center. Three constraints define the problem. First, SecOC authenticates every CAN and CAN-FD frame in real time, inside payloads that top out around 64 bytes — ML-DSA signatures and ML-KEM ciphertexts run into the kilobytes, so the real-time authentication path cannot simply be re-signed with a post-quantum primitive; the migration has to happen somewhere else in the chain. Second, the HSM is fixed-function silicon soldered into a vehicle that will still be on the road in fifteen to twenty years, with no OTA path to add lattice-math acceleration after the fact — so "harvest now, decrypt later" isn't an abstract future risk, it's a clock already running against hardware that shipped years ago. Third, the AUTOSAR crypto stack (CSM, CryIf, KeyM) was built around parameter assumptions that classical algorithms never forced anyone to question, which turns crypto-agility into a real integration problem rather than a configuration flag. This talk walks through where post-quantum primitives map cleanly today (OTA backend TLS, V2X certificate issuance, secure boot signing), what has to stay symmetric and why, and how an ISO 21434-aligned risk assessment was used to decide which ECUs and assets get migrated first when neither silicon nor budget allow migrating everything at once. Key TakeawaysAttendees will leave with:
| Room D (9) The Other End of the Handshake: Cryptographic Dependency Mapping for PQC MigrationTwo years into the post-quantum readiness era, aligning on the algorithms is the easy part - NIST has standardized them. The hard part, that quietly derails migration programs, is the wiring: knowing what cryptography you run, where it lives, and, critically, what is connected to what and more importantly what communicates with what. This session makes the case that PQC remediation is fundamentally a dependency problem, not simply discovery and visibility. A weak protocol or a quantum-vulnerable key almost never affects only a single endpoint; it affects the relationship between 2 entities. Disable TLS 1.1 on one side of a handshake while the peer can only speak the old protocol, and you don't harden the channel, instead you break it, often a production-critical one. Fix the wrong end first and you simply relocate the weakness. Remediation must be enforced on both ends of every cryptographic relationship, at the same time. Drawing on real enterprise migration experience - including the realities of large financial-sector estates, this session will walk through a dependency-first method any organization can start with as a foundation. We start with a simple example: a single scanner finding of TLS 1.1 on a payments endpoint, and how mapping it’s peer communication set, turns the remediation ticket into much more than just remediating a single endpoint. We will look at how organizations can lay the foundation to building and maintaining a cryptographic dependency graph from layered telemetry. We go deep on the hardest dependency tree of all: certificate hierarchies and machine identities. A quantum-vulnerable root doesn't invalidate a service; it invalidates a trust fabric. PKI and the exploding population of non-human identities must be mapped first and then migrated, a Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOM), which is dependency-aware by design, becomes a living source of truth rather than a one-time inventory. We aim to have attendees leave with a concrete, vendor-neutral playbook: how to assemble the dependency graph, how to compute remediation clusters and surface blockers before a change window, how to sequence coordinated "add-then-remove" cutovers, and how to prioritize by secrecy lifetime based on the harvest-now-decrypt-later attack vector. | Room F (6&7)Workshop Workshop: Post-Quantum Trails Board GameThis interactive, hands-on workshop is centred around Post-Quantum Trails, an educational board game designed to demystify the complexities of migrating to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), a joint project brought to life by Cybernetica and the OpenSSL Foundation. As quantum computing advances, the transition to quantum-safe cryptographic standards is no longer optional; it has become urgent. Yet for many developers and stakeholders, the migration process feels overwhelming and too abstract. The game brings this journey to life, guiding players through the real-world challenges of developing, standardizing, and deploying PQC solutions, and highlighting both the technical problems and the strategic trade-offs involved. Participants will learn about the PQC landscape, understand the risks of delayed migration, and engage in a collaborative simulation that reflects actual industry challenges. Earlier versions of this workshop have been run at the OpenSSL Conference and NordSec 2025, and the facilitators will introduce the game, explain the rules, and be on hand throughout to help players, answer questions, and discuss the awareness aspect of PQC migration. | |
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| 5 min CET | Red hall Implementing the PKI Consortium PQC Maturity Model at Siemens Trust CentreAs the transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) accelerates, organizations face a challenge that extends far beyond algorithm replacement. Success depends on understanding cryptographic dependencies, coordinating multiple stakeholders, managing supplier readiness, and establishing a sustainable model for cryptographic agility. The PKI Consortium's Post-Quantum Cryptography Maturity Model (PQCMM) provides a structured framework for assessing the quantum readiness of products and services within the supply chain. At Siemens Trust Centre, we examine how this vendor-centric model can be expanded into an enterprise-wide governance and transformation framework. This session presents Siemens' approach to adapting the PQCMM for one of the world's largest industrial and technology environments, spanning enterprise IT, public key infrastructure, product security, and operational technology. We describe how PQCMM was integrated into a broader cryptographic governance strategy, enabling consistent assessment of suppliers, internal platforms, PKI services, smart card technologies and virtual smart card solutions. The presentation shares practical lessons learned while building a cryptographic inventory, establishing quantum-readiness assessment criteria, evaluating strategic vendors, and defining measurable maturity targets across diverse technology domains. Particular emphasis is placed on translating technical PQC requirements into actionable governance mechanisms, supplier management processes, and migration roadmaps. We will present findings and obstacles from the implementation from HSMs, CAs and RAs, as well as governance mechanisms we had to redesign. Attendees will learn why cryptographic visibility and dependency management often represent greater challenges than algorithm adoption itself, and why cryptographic agility must become a core enterprise capability rather than a one-time project outcome. The session concludes with practical experiences to operationalize PQC readiness, establish common maturity metrics across technology ecosystems, and align supplier management, PKI modernization, and enterprise transformation activities under a single strategic framework. | Blue hall PQC Transition in Production, Season 1: Network EncryptionAs a provider of cybersecurity solutions, Stormshield has been working on the post-quantum transition for years, for its products but also for its own IT transition. 2026 is the year when the transition starts to reach production. Focus is put on encryption, because of the store-now-decrypt-later risk, and on the network, for various reasons presented during the talk. In this session we look at both technical aspects (which protocols, which tools, hints and feedback) and strategic aspects: what to do first, what to delay, and the non-technical issues. The session closes with a first feedback on what was easy, what was not, and what has not been migrated as expected during this year. | Room A (2) PQC Budgeting: How to Address the Costs of PQC ReadinessAs governments and regulatory bodies around the world accelerate guidance and migration timelines for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), mid-to-large enterprises face an increasingly urgent question: how much should we budget, and where do we begin? While the timeline for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer remains uncertain, the need to prepare is becoming a board-level risk management priority. This session presents a pragmatic approach to building a multi-year PQC budget that balances technical requirements, operational realities, and financial constraints. Attendees will explore the primary cost drivers of a successful migration, including cryptographic discovery and the creation of a Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOM), certificate lifecycle modernization, crypto-agility initiatives, HSM and key management upgrades, application remediation, testing, governance, and workforce enablement. The presentation also discusses how organizations can prioritize investments based on business risk, regulatory obligations, and cryptographic exposure, enabling a phased migration rather than a costly rip-and-replace approach. Participants will leave with a practical budgeting framework, recommended milestones, and executive-level strategies for securing funding and building organizational consensus. The objective is to help enterprises transform PQC readiness from an abstract future concern into a measurable, achievable cybersecurity program with clear business value. | Room B (5) Governing the PQC Transition in the US and the EU: A Comparative AnalysisAlthough the US has been regarded as a frontrunner in the global pursuit of quantum-readiness, distinguished by its top-down approach to the PQC transition, hosting the main institutional venue undertaking PQC standardisation, and producing a considerable amount of technical guidance through its specialist agencies, it has been facing significant domestic implementation challenges. Both executive and legislative bodies have cast a critical light, citing the slow pace of progress, the limited scope of the current US PQC migration strategy (making it mandatory only for federal government) and the lack of appropriate leadership. The adjustments that have been proposed include, among others, more streamlined governance, performance measurement, and better encouragement for all sectors to embrace this change. New legislative proposals addressing the PQC transition have since proliferated and executive actions have reportedly been in the pipeline. After backsliding from some elements of the previous administration's PQC transition course in June 2025, the current administration released its Cyber Strategy in March 2026, promising to accelerate PQC deployment. Meanwhile CISA, one of the key actors in facilitating this transition, has been exposed to a rather precarious situation, leading to a sizeable reduction of its workforce, which may have some disruptive impact on the governance of this process. In the EU the PQC migration has been unfolding quite differently. Here, the process has been driven for some time by strong policy entrepreneurship and expertise coming from national cybersecurity authorities in several Member States, which can be viewed as a bottom-up dynamic. The EU-level strategy formulated in 2024 appears to be more comprehensive than the US equivalent, as alongside public administrations it encompasses critical infrastructures. There is also a sound legal base in EU law, consisting of a set of regulatory instruments requiring state-of-the-art cybersecurity measures commensurate with the risks and fulfilment of the principles of privacy-by-design and security-by-design. Arguably, however, this should be strengthened by making requirements regarding PQC more explicit and by streamlining them across the various existing instruments and guidelines for consistency and legal certainty. There is also a need for the EU to enhance its funding for PQC development and deployment, based on the rationale that it represents the main solution in countering the quantum threat, especially in the near term. Recent EU legislative proposals have generally stressed the increasing urgency of enacting the PQC migration, and although the EU has tangibly contributed to the US-led PQC standardisation endeavours with its scientific excellence in the field of cryptography, these new proposals also signal that the EU might now be set to pursue its own framework. Attendees of this session will benefit from a granular view of how the PQC transition has been governed in these two jurisdictions and what future projections can be identified. | Room C (8) C509 PKI: A Lightweight PKI for Modern and Post-Quantum ApplicationsC509 is a lightweight approach to Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that brings the established X.509 PKI model to constrained devices and modern applications. Rather than focusing primarily on reducing certificate / CRL / OCSP size, C509 simplifies the certificate structure and avoids much of the complexity traditionally associated with ASN.1-based X.509 implementations. This can reduce code complexity, lower memory consumption, and reduce the attack surface of PKI implementations. This session presents the ongoing IETF work on C509 as a complete PKI ecosystem, covering certificates and certification requests, algorithm definitions, revocation, and integration with EST for certificate enrollment and lifecycle operations. The session will also discuss the evolution of C509 for post-quantum cryptography, including the integration of PQC algorithms and the resulting considerations for certificate structures, algorithm identifiers, signatures, and interoperability. Based on ongoing standardization and implementation experience, the presentation will share design considerations and lessons learned from simplifying PKI data structures and protocols. It will conclude with remaining challenges and opportunities for deploying C509 as a lightweight, interoperable, and crypto-agile PKI for IoT, connected devices, and other modern applications. | Room D (9) Retaining Cryptographic Control When Agentic AI Accelerates PQC MigrationAs organisations use AI to accelerate PQC migration, they risk creating a new form of crypto sprawl: AI-generated code that embeds algorithms, key references, provider choices, and local policy assumptions. This session shows how policy-bound cryptographic interfaces, CI/CD guardrails, and intent-level APIs can help teams use AI without losing cryptographic control. As organisations prepare for PQC migration, agentic AI introduces a new governance risk: coding agents can generate cryptographic integrations faster than security teams can review, approve, and manage them. Without clear constraints, AI-generated applications may hard-code algorithms, key references, provider calls, fallback logic, and local policy assumptions across the software estate. The result can be greater crypto sprawl, reduced crypto agility, and new obstacles to controlled PQC migration. This session presents an architecture and API approach for using AI safely in PQC migration programmes. Instead of allowing AI-generated applications to make cryptographic decisions, applications should express cryptographic intent while policy, key association, provider routing, algorithm selection, audit, and lifecycle management remain centrally governed. The session covers CI/CD guardrails, coding standards, policy-controlled migration from classical to post-quantum algorithms, and evidence collection for CBOM and phased cutover planning. Attendees will leave with a practical model for preventing AI-generated crypto sprawl while still using AI to accelerate PQC readiness. | Room E (10) Hash based Signatures - A decision supportWhen it comes to the selection of a PQC signing algorithm the family of hash based signatures pose a valid and highly interesting choice. All of its family members like SLH-DSA, LMS, XMSS provide a very conservative and mature model of security and cover a brought span of parametric options. Hence, they seem to be a natural choice in practice, especially when NIST announced new parameter sets for SLH-DSA (NIST SP800-230). However, due to their extreme diverse parametric options they are discussed most controversial: from super efficient on certain operations vs. challenging on others, super mature in design vs. challenging in handling the state. In numerous projects we gained a large set of experiences how to select the optimal signing algorithm and what are the practical implications. In this talk we want to share our experiences. We give an overview over the different advantages and challenges and provide a decision workflow to select the optimal signing algorithm for dedicated classes of use cases. | |
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CET | Red hall Insights into a Post-Quantum Safety Transformation JourneyThe quantum threat is no longer theoretical. Yet moving a large organization from awareness to structured action, systematically and without paralysis, remains genuinely difficult. This talk shares practical insights from two years inside a live post-quantum security transformation, built around four pillars. Planning despite uncertainty: how hypothesis-based planning keeps long-term strategy adaptable, and how transparency and accountability turn ambiguity into a manageable condition rather than a blocker. Making risk tangible: abstract threats don't move budgets, so we present our framework for prioritizing across a complex IT landscape, including a method for quantifying quantum exposure and translating it into a concrete sense of urgency for decision-makers. Building awareness that sticks: transformation stalls without broad understanding, so we share what has worked for propagating post-quantum safety awareness internally across all organizational levels, and externally through collaboration with partners and suppliers. Governing what you measure: a real insight into our operative governance model, the KPIs we track, the maturity framework we developed, early results, and an honest outlook on the road ahead. We offer no definitive answers; quantum readiness is still a work in progress for us, as it is for most. What we can offer is a transparent view into a complex, ongoing transformation and the frameworks that have helped us navigate it. | Blue hall Adventures with LMS: Lessons from Implementing Stateful Hash-Based Signatures for Post-Quantum TrustLMS is a proven post-quantum signature scheme, but its stateful nature creates deployment challenges that are easy to underestimate. This session shares practical lessons from implementing LMS in real-world post-quantum trust scenarios, with a focus on one-time signature key management, constrained environments, firmware-style workflows, verification performance, and operational failure modes. Attendees will learn where LMS fits, where it does not, and what engineering decisions are needed to deploy stateful hash-based signatures safely as part of a quantum-resistant architecture. | Room F (6&7) Roundtable: Healthcare considerations for PQCSecuring Healthcare for the Quantum Era: A PQC Readiness Roundtable Medical devices approved and deployed today will remain in clinical use for a decade or more, and patient records carry confidentiality obligations measured in decades. Both timelines run past the point at which today's public-key cryptography is expected to fail, yet healthcare has some of the longest certification cycles and the least room for disruptive change of any sector. This roundtable brings healthcare providers, device manufacturers, life sciences organizations, and their suppliers together for a working discussion rather than a series of presentations. After a short introduction from the moderator, participants will examine what post-quantum readiness looks like in environments where equipment cannot simply be patched, where regulatory approval governs every change, and where availability is a patient safety matter. The discussion will focus on a small number of practical questions: how post-quantum migration fits into device certification and product lifecycles; what healthcare organizations can reasonably demand from their suppliers and on what timeline; and how to protect long-lived patient data against harvest-now-decrypt-later exposure. The main conclusions will feed into a brief recap during the conference's closing session. | |||||
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| 5 min CET | Red hall The Board Factor: What Makes PQC Programs Succeed or StallCryptographic resilience requires multi-year enterprise transformation, not a technical remediation exercise. Yet many organizations still treat it as one. That is a mistake. Digital trust depends on a cryptographic estate that is everywhere, used by everyone, yet owned by no one. Its closest organizational parallel is not in technology. It’s data. And that parallel is not reassuring. Data management and governance programs are decades old and rife with failure. Meanwhile, PQC has a hard three- to eight-year deadline. Like early data initiatives, PQC programs meet nearly every condition for failure: a long-time horizon, lack of business ownership, deep technical complexity, unmapped dependencies, low enterprise literacy, and budget cycles that reward near-term value over invisible risk reduction. Compounding these challenges, uncertain impact timelines mean that those responsible for acting on PQC today may be the ones to suffer tomorrow’s consequences, weakening urgency, ownership, and escalation. Enterprise transformation is ultimately a complex systems problem. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety is clear: the system will defeat any controller that lacks the capacity to manage its complexity. That controller is your PQC program. Drawing on systems theory, modern data governance principles, and more than 30 years of experience leading complex enterprise transformations, this session demonstrates why inventories, standards, and vendor readiness are necessary but insufficient, and why early board engagement is a determining factor in PQC program success. Participants will leave with a concrete, practice-tested framework for establishing cryptographic governance and securing sustained board engagement. | Blue hall Gaming the Speed-vs-Memory Tradeoff for ML-DSA and ML-KEMFIPS is only a suggestion, sortof. Specifically, FIPS only requires "mathematical equivalence" to the listed algorithms, and that gives a surprisingly wide latitude for implementations to play algorithmic games in search of either fast or small implementations. This talk will explore speed-vs-memory tradeoff techniques applicable to the ML-DSA and ML-KEM algorithms and the results that they obtain within the Bouncy Castle Rust library. We start with a close look at the "default" implementation, then at what you can do to move around the High Speed <--> Low Memory spectrum. In one direction, you can pre-expand intermediate values at key-load time for faster sign, verify, encaps and decaps operations which gives performance increases in the 40% - 60% range (especially valuable if doing multiple operations against the same key). In the other direction, your in-memory private key representation can consist of only intermediate seed values and you can re-derive the active lattice values one entry at a time as they are needed; you pay a penalty for deriving the same intermediate values multiple times for a dramatic reduction in memory footprint. This technique has a particularly pronounced effect on ML-DSA where ML-DSA-87.sign() can be performed in under 30 kb of peak memory usage, which represents roughly a 7.5x decrease in memory usage in exchange for a 6x increase in runtime; which is a win on heavily-loaded servers where parallelism is gated by RAM not by CPU. | ||||||
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| 5 min CET | Red hall Closing (Day 1)Brief closing remarks for the red hall audience and a preview of Day 2. | Blue hall Closing (Day 1)Brief closing remarks for the blue hall audience and a preview of Day 2. | ||||||
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CET | Red hall Welcome back — Day 2Welcome and agenda highlights for the red hall audience: a quick look at what is on today and how to get the most out of it. | Blue hall Welcome back — Day 2Parallel welcome and agenda highlights for the blue hall audience. | ||||||
CET | Red hallPanel discussion Your Suppliers Aren't Ready: PQC Supply Chain ReadinessYou have mapped your internal cryptographic assets, you have a migration plan, and you know which algorithms you are moving to. Then you open a ticket with your HSM vendor, your cloud key management provider, your identity platform, your network appliance manufacturer, and the answers range from vague to contradictory to silent. Your suppliers are the gap between your migration plan and your migration reality. The challenge is not limited to hardware security modules. Every product and service that uses cryptography (software libraries, CAs, signing services, authentication platforms, enterprise SaaS, embedded firmware) is a dependency in your PQC migration. And most of them are somewhere between Level 0 (nothing implemented) and Level 2 (production-ready but no inventory, no agility, no roadmap transparency). This session opens with a ten-minute introduction to how the PKI Consortium's PQC Maturity Model (PQCMM) works in practice, then the panel takes over: what does it actually look like to mandate PQC supplier requirements at a large institution, what do assessors find when they start evaluating products against a structured framework, and what would accelerate adoption of a common standard across the supplier ecosystem. Attendees leave with a practical starting point: how to introduce the PQCMM into procurement for high-priority suppliers today, what to put in contracts, and how to handle the inevitable exceptions. | Blue hall Mobile user authentication: post quantum trade-offsAt itsme, an eIDAS Level High recognised identity scheme, we explored several post-quantum migration strategies for user authentication. Itsme consists of a mobile application installed on the user's phone and a secure backend. In this context, user authentication means proving that the app is running on the same device the user originally registered with, combined with proof of knowledge and/or inherence (typically a PIN or biometrics) established by the user at registration. Given the current uncertainty around long-term post-quantum algorithm robustness and ecosystem maturity, we focused primarily on hybrid approaches — combining post-quantum cryptography with classical cryptography — to preserve today's security guarantees while building in resilience against future quantum threats. Beyond algorithm selection, a key challenge is migrating our existing user base to the new cryptographic scheme without compromising security or disrupting the user experience. In this talk, we will present the different approaches we implemented, give real numbers, discuss the impact each approach has on the user, and weigh the pros and cons of each. | ||||||
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| 5 min CET | Blue hall PQC-ready is not PQC-verified: ML-DSA downgrade and interoperability failures across two independent software verifiersStandardization is not the end of assurance. An algorithm can be standardized, shipped, and still have to be replaced or re-verified on short notice, and a hybrid signature can pass its own unit tests and still fail the first independent implementation that receives it. We encountered the second problem while adding ML-DSA-65 to a public offline evidence format: a development signer and verifier using the same JavaScript library agreed with each other, while an independent Python FIPS 204 implementation rejected the signature. That failure changed both our dependency baseline and our working definition of "PQC-ready." This deep dive presents the resulting reproducible artifact: a signer that covers the same canonical bytes with RSA-4096 and ML-DSA-65, an RFC 9881 SubjectPublicKeyInfo, and independent TypeScript and Python verification paths. The shared public corpus now contains thirteen conformance packages: five accepted packages and eight deliberate rejection controls. A separate six-package downgrade lab is replayed under two relying-party policies by both implementations, producing twenty-four verifier-policy observations with no verdict or first-failure-code mismatch. The session concentrates on three implementation boundaries.
The announced program addresses interoperability at the level of cryptographic modules and hardware. This session works one layer up, where two independent software verifiers read the same bytes and disagree about them; nothing in the announced program yet puts two independent verifiers on one signature and reports where they part company. Attendees leave with a concrete test matrix for their own hybrid formats: positive cross-implementation verification, one-bit signature controls, key-encoding checks, structural stripping tests, and an explicit rule for when classical-only evidence must stop being accepted. The code, prepared packages, expected results, and continuous-integration workflow are public under Apache-2.0 at https://github.com/tyche-institute/eatf-verifier/releases/tag/v0.6.1 (opens in a new tab) . This is an interoperability report and research reference implementation, not a product or trust service. | |||||||
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CET | Red hall PQC Starts at the Root of Trust: The Role of TPMs in Protecting Next-Generation Device IdentitiesAs organizations prepare for the transition to post-quantum cryptography, much of the conversation focuses on algorithms, certificates, and PKI infrastructure. Yet the success of any migration ultimately depends on where cryptographic keys are generated, stored, and protected. For billions of enterprise and IoT devices, that foundation is the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). This session explores the role of TPMs as the hardware root of trust enabling post-quantum migration for device identities and machine credentials. From certificate enrollment and key attestation to secure storage and cryptographic agility, TPMs provide the security foundation that allows PKI ecosystems to evolve without compromising trust. We will examine the practical challenges PKI teams face when introducing post-quantum algorithms into existing deployments (including the hardware refresh cycle) and describe how TPM capabilities can support the transition while maintaining compatibility with existing enterprise and IoT infrastructures. Attendees will gain a clearer understanding of how hardware-backed key protection intersects with PQC deployment, why device identity should be part of every migration roadmap, and what steps organizations can take today to prepare for a quantum-resilient future. | Blue hall Operationalizing PQC: Proposing a Common Crypto API for Agile PKI and Machine IdentityNIST has finalized its first working set of post-quantum cryptography standards. The NIST CSWP-39 paper has shifted the enterprise conversation from algorithm selection to cryptographic agility. For application development, PKI, HSM, and machine identity teams, the more challenging issue is no longer which algorithm to choose. Instead, it’s a structural problem: heterogeneous Certificate Authorities, HSMs, certificate lifecycle platforms, and application stacks each independently absorb migration complexity, with no shared abstraction to coordinate the transition. This session proposes a Common Crypto API: a standardized abstraction layer that separates responsibility across four tiers, ensuring that no single team or vendor owns the entire migration.
The Common Crypto API will help separate the responsibilities of cryptographic migration and management while simultaneously serving as an interoperability layer connecting all stakeholders to achieve crypto agility. Attendees will leave with a working model for de-siloing PQC migration responsibility and the opportunity to shape a cross-vendor interoperability blueprint by providing input to extending existing crypto API standards or developing a new one. | Room A (2) Discovery Tells the Truth: What Real Crypto Inventories Reveal About PQC ReadinessThe post-quantum transition is widely called "complex," but that word hides what the complexity actually is. PQC migration is both a technical challenge and an organizational one, and it is only when organizations begin cryptographic discovery that the full scope of both becomes visible. Discovery consistently reveals more than teams expect, and what it reveals is far more useful. Grounded in real data from discovery work across many organizations, including large-scale automated discovery, this session shows what discovery actually uncovers: not just the sprawl of keys, certificates, and protocols in use, but the organizational maturity behind them. Consider a pattern we see repeatedly: organizations that worked hard to eliminate SHA-1 from their certificates, while quietly continuing to rely on SHA-1 in SSH. The same weak algorithm, retired where governance was watching and untouched where it was not. Discovery turns out to be a remarkably honest signal. The state of an organization's crypto policy, the clarity of its roles and responsibilities, and the strength of its day-to-day cryptography management tend to move together, and discovery exposes all of it at once. Attendees will leave able to read their own discovery results not just as a technical inventory, but as an honest measure of how ready they really are. Because cryptographic maturity isn't what you fixed where everyone was looking. It's what you did where no one was. | Room F (6&7) Roundtable: Government PQC Guidance and Regulation — Where We Are and Where We're GoingMore than 30 national governments have now published guidance on post-quantum cryptography, ranging from two-page memos to migration handbooks running to hundreds of pages. Sector regulators then translate that guidance for the industries they oversee, and their approaches vary widely: informal supervisory dialogue, procurement requirements, convening and coordination, funded research programs, and formal mandates under financial-sector legislation. This roundtable brings together government agencies, sector regulators, standards bodies, and the organizations that must implement their guidance for a working discussion rather than a series of presentations. After a short introduction from the moderator, participants will compare approaches across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific: what the advantages and disadvantages of each model are, which approaches are working in practice, and where the gaps in global guidance lie. The discussion will give particular attention to what organizations operating across borders need from governments and regulators to keep their migrations aligned, and to what good practice in PQC guidance looks like. The main conclusions will feed into a brief recap during the conference's closing session. | ||||
CET | Room A (2)Lightning talk Tackling PQC and 47-Day Certificates in ParallelIn the next few years every enterprise will have to deal with two seismic shifts in digital trust that will redefine all security strategies: the phased reduction of SSL/TLS certificate lifespans to just 47 days by 2029, and the need to adopt quantum-resistant cryptography by 2030. Either mandate on its own is a major challenge. Together they represent an unprecedented technology lift for IT and security teams. The good news is that the foundational work for each of these initiatives helps the other. Achieving crypto agility starts with certificate agility. Organizations must gain complete visibility and control over their certificate landscape to ensure widespread use of PQC algorithms for data in transit. The coming step-down of maximum TLS server certificate lifespans to monthly renewals over the next three years will necessitate exactly the same thing. Wise enterprises will combine these two initiatives to eliminate redundant technology development and expense, avoid collisions between projects, and ensure overall quality. This presentation shares original research on enterprise readiness for these trends and describes the opportunity for enterprises to improve the outcomes of both initiatives by working on them together. Attendees will learn how a unified, automated approach to certificate automation and management can eliminate redundant efforts, reduce risk, and build agility for both mandates. | |||||||
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CET | Red hall Leveraging PKI in the Quantum Sovereign StackThe convergence of post-quantum cryptography, sovereign technology strategies, advanced AI, and accelerating computing power is forcing companies and countries to rethink how trust infrastructure is built and governed, with an evolved PKI at the core. Encryption, identity, communications, and computing are all being reinvented and PKI is as well. By architecting a Sovereign Quantum Stack that leverages PKI and vertically integrates an architecture of trust that spans silicon, enterprise systems, global communications, and space-based infrastructure we can define the security and stability of the next generation of quantum infrastructure, while future proofing industries and economies. This talk walks through a national plan to architect a sovereign quantum stack, and highlights the intersection of today's PKI and the requirements for tomorrows', by highlighting four of the most critical architectural layers:
PKI evolution, extension, and integration will be critical to global success of the future of encryption at scale-- and sovereign quantum stacks are this future. | Room A (2)Lightning talk How to Actually Start Your PQC TransitionIn discussions around the PQC transition, the technical migration challenge often receives the most attention. In practice, however, organizations face significant barriers before any cryptographic transition can begin: establishing governance, securing funding, aligning stakeholders, and setting up effective program management structures. This talk builds on a whitepaper currently being developed through hands-on experience from members of two Belgian communities, Quantum Circle and the Belgian Cybersecurity Coalition. It provides practical guidance for the early stages of PQC adoption, focusing on why these initial steps are complex, how organizations can structure the necessary PQC migration engine, and how to justify the scale and urgency of such a transformation. In addition, the talk challenges commonly repeated advice on initial migration preparation and prioritization, offering a more pragmatic alternative approach. | ||||||
CET | Room A (2)Lightning talk Stop Hiring PQC Experts !!!It is time organisations stopped making the mistake of assuming they need to hire a PQC expert. The real challenge has nothing to do with solving cryptography or researching new algorithms. PQC is not a cryptographic research problem anymore. It is a PKI, enterprise and operations problem. Let's be blunt: hiring PQC experts without fixing PKI operations is like hiring quantum physicists to fix a broken plumbing system. The mathematics is not the problem, the infrastructure is. Most organisations still struggle with the basics: expired certificates, unknown trust relationships, weak crypto visibility, manual certificate processes and poor lifecycle governance. This session challenges the growing narrative that organisations need dedicated PQC specialists before they can begin preparing for the quantum era. Instead, it argues that PQC migration is fundamentally a PKI operational challenge. Replacing cryptographic algorithms is only one part of the problem; the real challenge is operationalising cryptography at enterprise scale across complex environments, legacy systems, hybrid infrastructures, certificate lifecycles, trust chains and governance models. This is where the real insight emerges. The people who can actually solve this are not those who understand the deepest mathematics of PQC, but those who understand how trust is built, managed, and sustained across an enterprise. PKI experts (the teams already responsible for certificates, key lifecycles, and trust infrastructure) are the ones who must be empowered. PQC is not about inventing cryptography anymore. It is about surviving its transformation. The organisations that succeed in the PQC transition will not be the ones with the most theoretical quantum knowledge. They will be the ones with mature PKI foundations, automated certificate management, strong governance and operational discipline. Provocative by design, this talk reframes PQC migration from a research problem into a real-world enterprise execution challenge, and explains why fixing PKI maturity today is the most important step toward becoming quantum ready tomorrow. | |||||||
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CET | Red hallPanel discussion Comparing Cryptographic Inventory Requirements Across IndustriesThis panel explores the differences in the requirements on cryptographic inventory, and how they impact remediation efforts and migration priorities across industry verticals. Chaired by an expert in cryptographic posture management, the panel brings together representatives from finance, telecoms, energy, healthcare and transportation to determine what each sector actually needs. The panel explores whether a universal inventory model is realistic across such fundamentally different environments, or whether sector-specific approaches to PQC discovery, cryptography information exchange and prioritisation will ultimately emerge. It covers the challenges of on-boarding external inventory tools, mapping cryptographic dependencies, and how to evaluate different tools against the individual needs of each industry. The topic becomes particularly interesting cross-sector because financial institutions may have mature PKI governance and strong visibility into certificates and identity infrastructure yet still struggle to map cryptographic dependencies within internally developed applications and third-party SaaS ecosystems; OT-heavy sectors such as energy, manufacturing, and transportation may know their physical assets in extraordinary detail while lacking visibility into embedded cryptography within industrial control systems, field devices, firmware, and operational protocols; and telecoms providers face challenges associated with highly distributed network infrastructure, vendor equipment, and complex trust relationships across operational environments. | Blue hall Lessons Learned from Deploying LMS at ScaleStateful hash-based signatures such as LMS are standardised and well understood, but translating them into deployable products involves challenges that are often absent from standards and academic literature. This talk discusses the practical realities of deploying a stateful hash-based scheme in long-lived hardware-rooted systems. Drawing on experience securing firmware update mechanisms in commercial PCs and printers, it explores how standards guidance, hardware lifecycles, resilience requirements, certification considerations and business constraints influenced key design decisions. It covers lessons from adopting the LMS standard into security features deployed at scale, including the challenges of balancing security, resilience, certification and operational requirements, and reflects on how later developments in standards, certification programmes and industry guidance reinforced, challenged or reshaped those decisions, and what this means for future quantum-resistant migrations. | Room A (2) Cryptography Without the Headache: From Assessment Framework to Agile APIEvery organization knows cryptography will need to change. New standards arrive, old algorithms age out, compliance requirements shift, and vulnerabilities force urgent decisions. Most systems still make those changes painfully expensive by embedding cryptographic choices deep inside applications and infrastructure. This talk argues that cryptographic agility is largely a systems design problem. We begin with a component-based assessment framework for evaluating how today’s cryptographic APIs support or hinder agility, and use it to examine widely deployed systems such as OpenSSL, JCA, Tink, AWS KMS, and Vault Transit. The result is a clear diagnosis of why migrations remain slow, expensive, and deeply tied to application code. We then show what it takes to fix the problem: an abstract cryptographic API built around intent-based operations, policy-driven algorithm selection, explicit key transformation, identity-based governance, and pluggable crypto backends. The payoff is a shift from cryptographic change as a distributed rewrite to cryptographic change as a managed control-plane decision. Attendees will leave with a practical way to assess their current cryptographic stack, a clearer picture of the architectural gaps blocking cryptographic upgrades, and a concrete API model for building systems that can evolve without breaking applications. | |||||
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CET | Red hallDemo Trust Now, Forge Later: A Live Exposure DemonstrationCurrent post-quantum planning is dominated by one clock, harvest-now-decrypt-later (HNDL), but for signature infrastructure the binding exposure is trust-now-forge-later (TNFL). Once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer arrives, long-validity signing anchors become forgeable, leading to loss of trust. Using the global passport and national identity infrastructure as an empirical model for TNFL exposure analysis and remediation prioritisation, this session shows in a live demonstration exactly how trust could collapse if urgent, globally coordinated action is not put in place. The dataset is the ICAO Master List: the self-signed country signing certificate authority (CSCA) roots that anchor verification of ICAO 9303 compliant machine-readable travel documents (MRTDs) worldwide, published as a Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS) structure and cross-checkable against the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) list. Both are public and neither requires Public Key Directory (PKD) participation at the CSCA layer. The demonstration walks through the pipeline end to end, using open tooling only so that anyone can reproduce it: hash and record provenance of the source file; unwrap the CMS encapsulated content and split the CscaMasterList into per-certificate DER with a standard-library walker; extract algorithm, key size and validity fields; then derive three outputs: installed base by algorithm and key-strength band, the share of anchors whose notAfter extends past a set of CRQC scenario years, and a fingerprint-level reconciliation between the two source lists. Every figure regenerates from the script; none is asserted by hand. Findings are reported in aggregate, without singling out individual issuers. The reusable corollary for your own cryptographic estate is to treat the certificate as the asset-register entry, treat its notAfter field as a stated useful life, and then ask which anchors you are relying on past the point their signatures can be forged. The confidentiality wave of quantum cryptographic exposure, which dominates current attention, concentrates at scannable perimeters. The integrity wave, in contrast, is distributed across every component carrying a verifiable signature, so it surfaces only through inventory, not perimeter scanning. Attendees leave with a runnable method and an understanding of how to apply this to their own PKI estates. | Blue hall The PQC Ready German ID CardPost-quantum cryptography (PQC) adoption is mandated for critical EU infrastructure by 2030, yet integration into existing identity document ecosystems presents significant cryptographic and performance constraints. National ID cards with 10-year validity require quantum-resistant protection from issuance, necessitating a pragmatic transition strategy that balances algorithmic security guarantees with hardware resource limitations. This talk points out high-risk spots in the ID card ecosystem and the key requirements for its operation. Subsequently an approach for a step-by-step PQC migration is presented, including possible scenarios for the underlying Public Key Infrastructure. The solutions employ different NIST-standardized PQC algorithms alongside traditional cryptography using hybrid schemes. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated by the realization of a functional demonstrator implementing hybrid cryptographic schemes on a resource-constrained, ISO 7816-compliant smart card, addressing the critical challenges of signature generation and verification time and memory footprint during authentication operations. Finally, the results of the demonstrator are presented along with the identified challenges ahead. | Room A (2) Quantum-Safe Audit Log Relying on Attestation ProceduresLast year, we examined how hardware security modules can provide cryptographic attestation, i.e., a signed snapshot of the state of an HSM and/or of its keys. Trust in cryptographic infrastructure, however, often requires more than a snapshot; it requires proof of history. This presentation introduces cryptographically verifiable audit logs for hardware security modules, a mechanism that produces a tamper-evident, independently verifiable record of every operation performed on a cryptographic object over its lifetime. Where attestation tells you what a key looks like today, an audit log tells you everything that was done to it and when. Key ceremonies require a verifiable sequence of authorized operations that no snapshot can reconstruct; key migration requires a temporary export, so the destination device's attestation cannot prove the process was correct, but the combined audit logs of both devices can. The cryptographic architecture behind this relies on event chaining and attested log state, with tooling that runs entirely outside the HSM so that an auditor can verify the record without device access. For long-term validity, all of this must rest on quantum-safe roots of trust provisioned at manufacturing time. | Room B (5) Scaling of Memory and Bandwidth Requirements of Post-Quantum Signatures with Message SizeIn this work we analyse the qualitative memory and bandwidth efficiency properties of the currently standardised post-quantum signatures as such, and of their protocol integrations mainly in the X.509 context. The term qualitative in this respect refers to how memory and bandwidth requirements scale with the size of the signed message. Specifically, we address the question of how far the algorithms support online computations, also known as streaming, with respect to the signed message in the signing and verification operations. Further, we review the possibilities for the pre-computation of a short message representative outside the cryptographic module responsible for the signing or verification operation of the different signature schemes. We also give a preview of the corresponding cryptographic API of the PKCS#11 standard, which introduces numerous PQC signature algorithms in the upcoming version 3.2. We demonstrate that for specific realistic use cases, the qualitative memory and bandwidth efficiency of the PQC signature schemes in protocol use varies widely and tends to be substantially degraded compared to the traditional signature schemes based on RSA and elliptic curves, which always allow for the pre-computation of a short message representative in the form of a hash value. Our results are relevant to PQC migrations of existing applications using traditional RSA or elliptic curve schemes. | Room C (8) Measuring PQC Readiness for PKI: Introducing the PKI Maturity Model Extension Framework and Its First ExtensionMost organisations approaching post-quantum migration share the same blind spot: they have a roadmap, but no honest way to measure where their PKI actually stands. This session introduces two published outputs of the PKI Consortium's PKIMM Working Group: the PKI Maturity Model Extension Framework, and the PQC Readiness Extension for PKI built on top of it. The PKI Maturity Model already helps organisations benchmark their PKI programmes against an industry reference structured around four modules and fifteen capability categories. The Extension Framework defines a standardised way to overlay targeted, fast-moving maturity criteria (PQC, automation, cryptographic agility) onto the existing categories, with consistent scoring, weighting, and reporting rules. The PQC Readiness Extension, authored by Kennedy Nwup, is the first published extension, giving PKI owners a defensible answer to questions their CISOs, regulators and auditors are starting to ask. In this joint session, Roman Cinkais (Chair, PKIMM WG) and Kennedy Nwup (Vice Chair, PKIMM WG, and author of the extension) walk through the design of the Extension Framework, present the PQC Readiness Extension in detail, show how it is intended to be used in practice, and reflect on turning a working group draft into a published, community-endorsed specification. Attendees will leave with a published framework and a PQC Readiness Extension they can apply to their PKI programme straight away. | Room D (9) HAPKIDO Handbook: Navigating the Transition to Quantum-Safe PKIPKIs operate on the assumption that trusted credentials remain unforgeable over their lifetime. Advances in quantum computing challenge this premise: credentials trusted today may become forgeable in the future, introducing a "trust now, forge later" risk that directly impacts the integrity of digital identities and trust anchors. For PKI-dependent ecosystems, migration is not just a cryptographic upgrade problem. Long-lived certificates, complex trust hierarchies, and cross-sector dependencies mean that failures can propagate systemically, affecting entire digital trust ecosystems. Yet progress toward quantum-safe PKI remains fragmented, slowed by uncertainty around standards, timelines, and ownership. The HAPKIDO societal impact assessment shows that compromised PKIs could trigger cascading failures across sectors, from disruption of public services to economic instability in banking systems. This talk presents the HAPKIDO Handbook, which provides a consolidated, research-based framework to guide organisations and policymakers through the transition to quantum-safe PKI. It combines technical insights, governance perspectives, and societal risk analysis into a unified approach, with two main goals: raising awareness and providing actionable insights to support decision-making. The handbook presents two key contributions: a societal risk assessment method that translates abstract quantum threats into concrete organisational and societal risks, enabling prioritisation of critical assets and services; and a five-stage growth model guiding organisations from awareness to full ecosystem adaptation, emphasising the need for coordinated action across organisational and sectoral levels. Together, these frameworks position the transition not as a technical upgrade, but as a multi-actor transformation requiring alignment across ecosystems. The handbook highlights that early action is possible and necessary, including cryptographic inventory and adoption of cryptographic agility practices, as well as jointly testing hybrid solutions. Success depends on coordinated efforts across organisations and policymakers acting within a specific sector to avoid fragmentation and ensure interoperability. Stakeholders should begin risk-based assessment, invest in early experimentation, and actively participate in sector-specific collaboration and standardisation efforts. | Room E (10) The Agentic Control Plane: Measuring Post-Quantum Readiness in MCP and A2AAI Agents are now more widely used in production deployments, and they are no longer merely prototypes. Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) are emerging as the default protocols for how agents communicate with tools, data, and each other. This talk analyzes the state of post-quantum readiness in the emerging agent ecosystem and shows at which layers PQC actually matters. We scan a growing list of public MCP and A2A endpoints identified through open registries, GitHub, and well-known endpoint probes to measure internet exposure, authentication signals, TLS posture, mTLS detection, and post-quantum key exchange. For A2A agents, we also analyze whether Agent Cards are signed, which JWS algorithms are used, and what that implies for future signature migration. Our findings show that some endpoints have started to negotiate hybrid PQC key exchange, while the certificate identity layer remains classical. Further, we attempt to distinguish the CDN edge termination from the origin posture because edge-only numbers overstate the readiness. Legacy TLS versions still appear on deployment infrastructure. The key exchange layer matters now because of the harvest-now-decrypt-later risk, while the signature layer matters for agent identity, Agent Card provenance, and long-lived signed metadata. For publicly trusted WebPKI TLS certificates, certificate-layer PQC is not yet an option until the CA/B Forum finalizes PQC profiles and root programs accept them, but agents using Private PKI can begin piloting ML-DSA certificates. By the end of this presentation, the participants will have a practical checklist about how to assess post-quantum readiness of the agent infrastructure, including what to inventory, what to scan, which post-quantum signals are relevant today, certificate-layer changes to prepare for in the future, and finally how to address crypto-agility for your agent infrastructure. | |
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| 5 min CET | Red hall Estonian PQC Migration RoadmapThis presentation outlines Estonia's roadmap for transitioning the public sector to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), officially released in April 2026. Given the significant heterogeneity in cryptographic architectures, technical capacity, and operational criticality across public sector organisations, a uniform migration approach is neither feasible nor optimal. Instead, the roadmap introduces a risk-based categorisation framework that divides public sector institutions into four priority categories (Very High, High, Medium, and Low), each associated with distinct migration timelines and tailored implementation guidelines. A particular focus is placed on low-priority organisations, whose transition steps remain underdeveloped in most existing roadmaps. The talk first presents the developed organisation categorisation approach and the underlying risk-assessment criteria. It then details the migration framework, outlining preparation, cryptographic inventory, implementation, and monitoring steps tailored in their specifics to each priority level. Finally, in a landscape where multiple national and international PQC migration strategies are converging, the session presents a comparison with some of the existing roadmaps, along with lessons learned through the process of constructing Estonia's PQC migration roadmap. | Blue hall An Evaluation of PQC Algorithms in DNSSEC Using Real-World DataOver the last years, we have conducted a series of experiments to establish which PQC algorithms would be best suitable for replacing RSA and ECDSA in DNSSEC, the security extension of DNS. As a core internet protocol, it is important that DNS remains working securely when powerful quantum computers exist. DNS contains data that fits in a single small UDP packet, which is fast and reliable, or switches to a slower TCP connection for bigger packets, which uses more resources on the server side. Small signatures and public keys are therefore preferred. We present insights from our experiments after implementing PQC in the toolchain of DNSSEC, and testing PQC algorithms using real-world data from a top-level-domain operator and a large DNS resolver operator. Using real-world data allows us to measure the real impact of PQC algorithms on both client and server performance. | Room A (2) Bootstrapping PQC on Existing Hardware: A Three-Stage Migration FrameworkThe transition to post-quantum cryptography requires more than replacing algorithms. Public-key cryptography is deeply embedded in device identity, secure boot, code signing, certificate issuance, software delivery, and credential lifecycle management. For long-lived connected and industrial devices, immediate hardware replacement is often neither financially nor operationally practical. This presentation presents a three-stage migration framework for introducing PQC into existing device platforms while preserving current hardware roots of trust. In the first stage, symmetric cryptography and existing protected key storage are used to maintain secure boot and establish a trusted execution environment. In the second stage, that environment is used to generate, provision, and protect PQC credentials on the device. In the third stage, PQC credentials and the established boot chain are used to authenticate and deploy quantum-safe applications and software updates. The session will examine how this staged approach applies to constrained embedded devices and large, mixed-generation fleets. It will also address the operational challenges that determine whether such a migration can scale, including cryptographic agility, key protection, credential lifecycle management, rollback, code-signing evolution, and coexistence between classical and PQC-capable devices. The framework is based on practical experience designing PKI, secure boot, code-signing, and device-identity infrastructures for large populations of connected devices. It is intended for organizations that must begin PQC adoption before PQC-optimized hardware is broadly deployed. Attendees will leave with a concrete migration model for using existing hardware security capabilities to bootstrap PQC, introducing PQC credentials without replacing the entire installed base, and evolving PKI, secure boot, and software-signing infrastructures toward fully quantum-ready platforms. | Room B (5) Leveraging Agentic AI for Automated CBOM Inventory and Crypto-AgilityExtracting Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOMs) from source code is a foundational pillar of the Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) transition. However, traditional security scanning methods fall short. The limitations of SAST and vulnerability tools include limited support for legacy or proprietary languages where old cryptography often hides; the high friction and overhead of deep Abstract Syntax Tree analysis, which is computationally heavy and slows down CI/CD pipelines; scaling bottlenecks from heavy reliance on DevSecOps teams for onboarding and configuration; and a static, reactive posture that identifies risks but does not facilitate active crypto-agility. Integrating agentic AI into CI/CD pipelines via the Model Context Protocol introduces a scalable and code-agnostic approach to CBOM management. Beyond inventory, agentic AI enables true crypto-agility in pipelines, verifying pull requests and even fixing obsolete cryptography. | Room C (8) Bridging the Gap: A Hybrid TPM Strategy for Post-Quantum Virtual Smart CardsThough NIST finalized ML-KEM and ML-DSA some time ago, the industry is still facing a dilemma: how to secure hardware against future threats without waiting for silicon updates. While the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) released the TPM 2.0 Library Specification v185 in March 2026 with native PQC support, the reality of enterprise deployment is that most existing hardware remains on pre-PQC TPMs. This session moves beyond theoretical migration paths to dissect a real-world, production-grade implementation of a hybrid Virtual Smart Card architecture. We detail our transition from Microsoft's Virtual Smart Card ecosystem to a custom, standard TPM-based solution. The core of the discussion focuses on a stop-gap but robust hybrid model: leveraging software-based post-quantum algorithms (ML-KEM and ML-DSA) for cryptographic operations while utilizing the existing TPM for the secure storage of PQC private keys. We look at why hardware-based key protection is significantly more secure than software-based storage, comparing pure software key storage against TPM-sealed keys and the attack surface each presents (lateral movement, memory scraping, offline extraction), along with honest caveats about where the hybrid model still has gaps compared to fully native TPM computation. We then turn to key lifecycle management across mixed algorithm sets: generation, backup, rotation, and revocation, and what worked smoothly versus where the hybrid model introduces genuine complexity. The session concludes with a frank assessment of when to wait for native TCG v185 hardware, what it actually brings to the table, and what pitfalls to avoid during the transition. Attendees will leave with a concrete blueprint for implementing crypto-agility in constrained environments and criteria for deciding when to migrate from software-hybrid models to native TPM 2.0 v185 hardware based on threat modeling and resource availability. | Room D (9) A Pragmatic Strategy Behind PQC: 7 Decisions Every Enterprise Must Make Before MigrationOrganizations are rushing to inventory certificates, evaluate tooling, and launch discovery projects in preparation for post-quantum cryptography (PQC). But these activities often begin before the organization has answered the architectural and governance questions that determine what should actually change. The biggest obstacle to PQC readiness is no longer the cryptography; it is making the right organizational decisions before technology choices lock in years of unnecessary cost and complexity. This session presents a practical decision framework built around the seven strategic choices every enterprise should make before investing in PQC tooling or migration efforts. Rather than another discussion of algorithms or migration mechanics, attendees will learn how to establish a clear, executable roadmap using existing PKI investments, governance processes, and technical teams. The result is a strategy that reduces unnecessary spending, avoids premature implementation decisions, and creates a foundation for true cryptographic agility. Drawing from real-world enterprise PKI modernization engagements, this session demonstrates how organizations can prioritize business risk, define crypto agility objectives, align policy and architecture, and determine where inventories, assessments, and tooling actually fit within an overall PQC strategy. It covers why certificate inventory does not equal PQC readiness and where most programs go wrong, how to align business risk, governance, crypto agility, and PKI architecture before selecting technologies, and how to determine when tooling adds value and when it simply creates additional cost and complexity. Attendees will leave with a vendor-neutral framework they can immediately apply to reduce unnecessary spending, avoid premature implementation decisions, and build a foundation for long-term cryptographic agility. | Room E (10) Email Reborn: Post-Quantum encryption over the mailbox you already haveEnd-to-end encrypted email has existed for thirty years and is barely used. PGP puts key management on the user; S/MIME puts a CA and an enrolment process on the organisation and still stops at its border; the modern alternatives require both parties to move to the same provider. Substituting ML-KEM for RSA in any of those changes the algorithm and not the deployment. At the same time, mail is the workload where harvest-now-decrypt-later is least hypothetical: it is archived for years by both parties and by everything in between. This talk covers the engineering of Eon Phoenix Mail, a client that encrypts over an existing mailbox — IMAP/SMTP, including hosted consumer and enterprise providers — with no new address and no server-side change, and what that constraint forced. It is free software under AGPL-3.0: clients, message envelope and directory server are all in the open, and the cryptographic claims in this talk can be read back in the source. Cryptographic construction. A hybrid envelope: ML-KEM-1024 with X25519 for key establishment, ML-DSA-87 with Ed25519 verified under logical AND for authenticity, AES-256-GCM for content. The KEK derives from HKDF-SHA256 over both shared secrets plus the KEM ciphertext and ephemeral public key, with domain separation per use; sign-then-encrypt, one content key wrapped per recipient, so multi-recipient and group conversations fall out of the same structure. Implementation decisions. Two independent implementations of the same wire format — one on OpenSSL 3.5, one pure-Go — with byte-identical key encodings and a cross-implementation interop test, because the FIPS story and the cgo-free mobile and Windows builds pull in opposite directions. FIPS 203/204 known-answer vectors run in CI. One build-tag collision with the Go standard library silently disabled AES hardware acceleration: 115 MB/s against 1976 MB/s, with every test still green. Design decisions worth arguing about. Protection is chosen per message rather than per product, across five levels from ordinary mail to a read requiring a second party's cooperation, with self-erase and metadata suppression as separate stackable switches from a single registry both user interfaces derive from. Recipients without the client get ordinary mail instead of a blocked send. Metadata is treated as its own axis, with an explicit list of what the design does not hide: the domain pair, the gateways themselves, and traffic volume. Failures, in detail, because they are the transferable part: SRV-based key discovery that resolved on every desktop and never on mobile; key rotation that destroyed previously received mail; an in-band key header large enough to push short messages into spam classification; and a directory lookup that queried the sender's domain instead of the recipient's. Audience: implementers migrating a deployed protocol to post-quantum primitives, where key distribution, graceful degradation and metadata are harder than the KEM. Everything shown is running code under an open licence, so any part of it can be taken and reused. | |
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CET | Red hall Making PQC Migration Verifiable: CBOM Profiles for the EU Roadmap and BeyondThe post-quantum transition has two problems: a deadline and a lack of proof. The EU Coordinated Implementation Roadmap sets clear milestones for moving to quantum-safe cryptography. Meeting them depends on something most organizations still don’t have: verifiable evidence of what cryptography runs in their own systems and in their suppliers’ products. Without it, migration plans rest on assumptions, and organizations can’t show progress to boards, customers or regulators. Cryptographic Bills of Materials (CBOMs) give you visibility. CBOM profiles make that visibility verifiable. A profile sets out what must be disclosed, for what purpose and in how much detail. That makes cryptographic inventories consistent, comparable and auditable across the supply chain, whether they are written in CycloneDX or SPDX. This hybrid session pairs a tutorial with hands-on work. We introduce two reference profiles developed in the PKI Consortium CBOM Profiles Working Group. One supports supply-chain PQC migration and is aligned with the EU Roadmap milestones. The other addresses procurement assurance. Working through real product examples, participants will apply the profiles to set supplier expectations, prioritize high-risk systems, measure migration progress and evidence readiness. The EU Roadmap is where we start, not where we stop. We close with a discussion of how a common profile approach carries into other jurisdictions and sectors, giving organizations one framework for proving quantum readiness wherever they operate. | Blue hallPanel discussion CLM 2.0: What's Deployed, What's Broken, What's NextA year ago at the PQC Conference in Kuala Lumpur, this panel mapped the roadblocks on the path to post-quantum resilience. Twelve months on, the questions have shifted. Certificate lifetimes are collapsing toward 47 days. Post-quantum cryptography has moved from roadmap slide to operational planning under regulator and customer pressure. AI-driven workloads are beginning to demand identity at a scale traditional certificate lifecycle management was never built to support. Conversations inside CISO offices and architecture reviews have moved from strategy to deployment. This session reconvenes the original panel for an implementation-grounded follow-up. The aim is to move past the vision and into the field: what is actually running in enterprise production today, where the new operational load is causing real failures, and what is getting torn out and rebuilt. Discussion will surface specifics: observed automation maturity across enterprise estates, failure modes under accelerated renewal cadence, and the trade-offs that emerge when crypto agility, hybrid PQC, and machine identity converge inside the same stack. Most sessions on CLM and PQC remain at the level of strategy, principle, or capability inventory. This panel stays inside the operational reality: what works at scale, what fails first, and what the next architecture looks like once we accept that CLM is no longer an operations function but a control plane for trust. That reframe carries practical consequences: where policy lives, who owns PQC migration, how AI agent identities are issued and revoked at workload speed, and what resilience metrics should replace the older uptime-and-renewal dashboards. The conversation is structured around four working areas: the breaking point of current approaches in a 47-day world; PQC and crypto agility as an operational discipline rather than a research topic; the architecture of a trust control plane, including how AI and autonomous workloads fit; and the business and risk reframe needed to fund and govern the shift. Attendees will leave with a clearer sense of where peer organizations actually stand on automation, PQC readiness, and machine identity scale, a working definition of what CLM 2.0 demands in practice, and a sharper view of the most expensive blind spots hiding inside today's deployments. | Room F (6&7) Roundtable: Securing the Financial Sector for the Quantum EraThe financial sector has moved further than most towards a coordinated post-quantum migration. The Quantum Safe Financial Forum, together with FS-ISAC and CFDIR, has published a framework for prioritizing use cases and sequencing the transition in shared implementation waves. The question facing institutions now is no longer what the framework says, but what it means for their own portfolios, their vendors, and their supervisors. This roundtable brings banks, central banks and supervisors, market infrastructures, and their technology suppliers together for a working discussion rather than a series of presentations. After a short introduction from the moderators, participants will work through how the prioritization applies in practice: which use cases institutions are actually starting with, where their sequencing differs and why, and what the shared waves require from the providers on which the whole sector depends. The discussion will give particular attention to the dependencies no single institution can resolve alone, from payment and settlement infrastructure to the vendors and standards every participant relies on, and to what institutions need from regulators to keep the transition aligned across markets. The main conclusions will feed into a brief recap during the conference's closing session. | |||||
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| 5 min CET | Red hall 120,000 Tasks: The Cryptography Was the Easy PartThe integrated master schedule for one large enterprise's post-quantum migration grew past 120,000 discrete tasks. It was not a count of devices, certificates, or applications to upgrade. If it were, 120,000 would be small. The direct remediation work, the actual cutovers across every device and application, accounted for fewer than 30,000 tasks (a million-plus devices, systems, and apps grouped into upgrade batches). The remaining 90,000 or so tasks are the enablement system: inventory as a living capability, governance and reporting cadence, vendor lifecycle enforcement, testing and assurance, workforce change, ecosystem and partner alignment, and ongoing operations during the long hybrid period. Drawing on that 120,000-task plan (illustrative of complexity, not a universal count) and on three decades running high-stakes delivery programs such as national payments systems and federal health-records platforms, the talk turns to what actually governs whether such a program finishes. It is rarely the cryptography. It is the density of interdependencies: vendors waiting on internal teams, shared infrastructure that must be ready before application waves can move, regulatory deadlines colliding with finite engineering capacity. It is ownership, because cryptography is everyone's problem and therefore no one's, so the program needs a single accountable lead with authority across security, IT, engineering, procurement, and OT. It is workforce capacity, since the trained people a program needs at its peak in years four to eight cannot be conjured on demand. And it is funding that has to survive several budget cycles and more than one CISO. PKI realities sit inside this frame: certificate migration planned as waves rather than a single flag day, and PKI and HSM procurement and certification lead times treated as hard scheduling constraints. Attendees leave able to right-size and sequence their own program, separate a credible plan from a wishful timeline, argue for a single accountable owner and the governance to back one, build the board case for multi-year funding, and prioritize by risk so the program delivers measurable security gains in years one to three while the longer effort runs on. | Blue hall Adding PQ Capabilities to SSH Protocol: The Fedora ApproachOpenSSH and libssh are 2 mostly widespread implementations of SSH protocol. Real-world requirements for PQ crypto causes writing significant patches to OpenSSH because of difference of the upstream and downstream requirements. libssh upstream is more binded to Fedora maintainers and lands the changes upstream. The talk covers key downstream changes in OpenSSH: using OpenSSL code, providing extra algorithms support, FIPS compatibility quirks, in OpenSSH, and corresponding changes in libssh. | Room A (2) Role of CBOM in a Telco's PQC JourneyThis presentation on behalf of the GSMA PQTN task force will examine the role of a "Cryptographic Bill of Materials" in the telecommunication sector. The session will explore CBOM and its relationship to the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), review the current standards landscape, identify telecommunications-specific use cases, and outline the regulatory drivers shaping adoption. The need for industry alignment on CBOM use, format, and content as a means to simplify the management and communication of cryptography between parties will be highlighted. This "CBOM profile" will provide telco operators with a structured way to express cryptographic requirements, plan the migration to post-quantum cryptography, and manage cryptographic assets across their lifecycle, while giving vendors the mechanisms to communicate the cryptographic assets and future roadmap commitments associated with their products and services to operators and other stakeholders. The session concludes with actionable recommendations for telco network operators, vendors, and other relevant stakeholders engaged in the transition to post-quantum cryptography. The presentation will be of interest to network operators, the entire telecommunications supply chain, and government regulators. It complements other standardization and industry adoption efforts. | |||||
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| 5 min CET | Red hall Closing (Day 2)Brief closing remarks for the red hall audience and a preview of Day 3. | Blue hall Closing (Day 2)Brief closing remarks for the blue hall audience and a preview of Day 3. | ||||||
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CET | Red hall Welcome back — Day 3Final day framing for the red hall audience: what is ahead, and how to make the most of the last day before heading back into the real world. | Blue hall Welcome back — Day 3Parallel welcome and agenda highlights for the blue hall audience. | ||||||
CET | Red hall How Close Is the Threat, and What Does a Board Owe Its Shareholders Now?Post-quantum migration deadlines are now fixed by regulation — the EU Coordinated Implementation Roadmap, EO 14412 — but the pace of quantum hardware remains the variable every budget rests on. This keynote gives an independent read on where quantum computing actually stands, from the researcher who leads BCG's quantum program and has published more than 15 pieces on the field. The session covers three things. First, the vendor and hardware-modality landscape: where the leading players stand across superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, photonic and annealing approaches, and how logical-qubit and error-correction milestones translate into credible timelines. Second, the impact of AI on the field — as an accelerant for error correction, algorithm design and system control, and as a driver of the compute economics that will decide which platforms win. Third, the risk picture: the current range of estimates for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, the harvest-now-decrypt-later exposure organizations already carry, and how boards and regulators should think about investment and migration timing under that uncertainty. It closes with the question boards cannot defer: if there is even a small probability that RSA-2048 fails by 2030, what is the fiduciary obligation to act today, and how should investment and migration be sequenced under that uncertainty? Attendees will leave with a clear-eyed view of quantum progress and what it means for the urgency and pace of their own post-quantum transition. | Blue hall Merkle Tree Certificates for Private PKI: Size, Scale, and Transparency in the Post-Quantum EraMerkle Tree Certificates (MTCs) introduce a new approach to PKI that can help address several challenges associated with post-quantum cryptography migration. This presentation reviews three key deployment properties currently being explored within the IETF: reducing certificate size to mitigate the impact of larger PQC algorithms, enabling efficient batch signing and issuance for large-scale deployments, and leveraging transparency mechanisms to detect unauthorized certificate issuance and cryptographic downgrade attacks. The talk focuses on how these capabilities can be applied within private PKI environments, examining practical deployment considerations, operational trade-offs, and opportunities to integrate MTCs alongside existing X.509-based infrastructures. | ||||||
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| 5 min CET | Red hall Scaling Quantum Safe: How HSBC Transitions from Early Momentum to Enterprise ExecutionQuantum Safe transformation is emerging as a critical strategic priority for financial institutions, though most organisations are still in relatively early stages of structured execution. This session shares HSBC's experience in evolving its Quantum Safe journey from a collection of early initiatives into a structured enterprise programme designed for long-term migration. As a global financial institution operating across complex technology landscapes, HSBC recognised that successful cryptographic transformation requires more than identifying vulnerable algorithms or testing new technologies. It requires alignment across business priorities, technology domains, governance structures, third-party ecosystems, operational processes, and future investment decisions. The session explores how HSBC approached this transition by consolidating existing insights, validating readiness, strengthening alignment across stakeholders, and creating the foundations for the next stage of execution: moving from awareness and experimentation into an enterprise transformation mindset, strengthening board-level visibility, and building the governance, ownership, and execution model needed for a multi-year journey. Rather than focusing only on technology change, this session highlights the organisational and strategic lessons behind scaling Quantum Safe adoption in a large financial institution. | Blue hall How AI Is Compressing the Cryptographic Threat TimelineAbstract This talk looks at three recent results that together change the outlook for cryptographic risk. It starts with classical factoring. Two RSA Challenge records fell within sixteen days in September 2026: first RSA-260 (862 bits), then RSA-896. Both were factored with the general number field sieve, a method that is decades old, after AI coding agents ported it to large GPU clusters. The talk will explain why the mathematics stayed the same while AI-accelerated engineering on AI hardware still changed the economics of attacking legacy RSA-1024 keys. The second part covers AI-driven cryptanalysis of post-quantum candidates. In July 2026, an AI research agent found a classical key-recovery attack on HAWK, a third-round candidate in NIST's additional signatures process. The attack exploits a Galois symmetry that halves the dimension of the lattice problem. It recovered HAWK-256 keys in hours on a single server, and the designers withdrew the scheme the next day. The same week, AI-driven analysis also improved the best known attack on 7-round AES. The talk will consider what these results mean for how much confidence to place in new algorithms. The third part looks at AI improving quantum attacks themselves. ECDSA.fail (opens in a new tab) was an open challenge where human researchers and AI agents competed to optimise the quantum circuit for elliptic-curve point addition, the core step in Shor's attack on ECDSA. In eight weeks, logical qubits fell by 58% and the Toffoli gate count by 67%, compared with the published Google baseline. The talk will show how this widens the gap between ECC and RSA timelines, with elliptic-curve systems reaching the quantum threshold sooner. The talk closes with what this means in practice for migration planners:
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CET | Red hall Beyond Discovery: Making Cryptographic Inventory ActionablePQC roadmaps and guidance, including the EU’s coordinated implementation roadmap and guidance from CISA, NSA, NIST, and the UK NCSC, emphasize discovery and inventory as foundations for migration. With several years of guidance and growing practical experience, what have organizations learned? Where is discovery enabling progress, and where does it risk becoming an exercise with no clear endpoint? This panel examines how that guidance translates into practice and what cryptographic posture management requires beyond collecting findings. The first question is scope: where does broad, exhaustive scanning add value, and where does it generate noise that slows everyone down? How should organizations decide where to point discovery tools first, when to expand coverage, and how to account for what remains outside scope? The second is context. Software is updated, dependencies change, keys and certificates rotate, and cryptographic configurations evolve. An inventory can therefore become outdated quickly. How current does that view need to be, what context matters, and what does it take to maintain it? The third is ownership. Cryptographic assets rarely belong to a single team, and their dependencies often extend into the supply chain. How should responsibility be divided among security teams, application owners, and suppliers, particularly when the organization identifying a risk cannot directly address it? The fourth is what happens after the scan. Discovery tools can generate large volumes of findings, and a report nobody acts on is worth little. What determines which findings deserve attention, who should act, and whether the response has achieved its purpose? Panelists will discuss what has worked, what has not, and where experience suggests that tooling, processes, or guidance need to evolve. | Blue hall Merkle Tree Certificates: Ready for Browsers and Beyond?The transition to post-quantum cryptography creates a practical challenge for certificate-based systems: post-quantum signatures are substantially larger than the signatures used today, potentially increasing certificate chains beyond what TLS and other constrained protocols can comfortably carry. Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs) offer a different model built around append-only logs, batched signatures, and compact inclusion proofs. This moderated panel will examine whether MTCs are ready for the browser use case for which they were originally designed—and whether the same model can work across the many public key infrastructures that operate beyond the Web PKI. Panelists will discuss the architecture and security properties of MTCs, implementation and interoperability considerations, certificate issuance and lifecycle management, and the operational changes required for relying parties, certificate authorities, browsers, servers, ACME clients, and enterprise PKI operators. The discussion will also consider how MTCs could apply to qualified trust services, device identity, telecommunications, government credentials, code and document signing, IoT environments, and other regulated or specialized trust infrastructures. The panel will explore both the potential and the limitations of the approach. Can MTCs materially reduce the bandwidth and performance impact of post-quantum certificate chains? What new dependencies and trust assumptions do they introduce? How would existing PKI systems need to change, and which use cases may not fit the browser-oriented model? Bringing together implementation, practitioner, qualified-trust-service, and non-Web-PKI perspectives, this session will give attendees a practical understanding of where Merkle Tree Certificates stand today, what work remains, and whether they can become a broadly useful foundation for post-quantum certificate ecosystems. | Room F (6&7) Roundtable: Securing Telecommunications for the Quantum EraTelecommunications networks carry the traffic that every other sector's post-quantum migration depends on, and they are among the hardest systems to change. Network equipment, SIM and eSIM platforms, and roaming and interconnect agreements run on long lifecycles and span many operators, vendors, and standards bodies. Industry guidance, including the GSMA's post-quantum telco work and ongoing 3GPP and IETF standardization, now gives operators a common starting point. The open question is how to turn that guidance into concrete plans across shared infrastructure. This roundtable brings together mobile and fixed operators, network and SIM vendors, standards contributors, and regulators for a working discussion rather than a series of presentations. After a short introduction from the moderator, participants will work through where operators are starting in practice: cryptographic inventory across the network, protection of signaling and management interfaces, subscriber identity and SIM provisioning, and the IoT estates that will outlive today's algorithms. The discussion will give particular attention to the dependencies no single operator can resolve alone, from roaming and interconnect partners to equipment vendors and the timing of standards. It will also cover what operators need from regulators to keep national and cross-border migration aligned. The main conclusions will feed into a brief recap during the conference's closing session. | |||||
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| 5 min CET | Red hall Prioritising Financial Sector Use-Cases for MigrationThe intricate web of interbank communications, transaction protocols, and shared infrastructure means no single financial institution can effectively navigate a successful Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) migration alone. The Quantum Safe Financial Forum (QSFF) was launched by Europol in 2024 and quickly established itself as the go-to authority for financial institutions grappling with the complexities of quantum-safe migration. The forum comprises experts from leading commercial banks, central banks, regulators and other financial entities. A dedicated Working Group within QSFF is actively developing an aligned roadmap: precisely defining the scope of each "use-case" for PQC implementation, establishing criteria for evaluating and prioritizing those use-cases, linking business contexts to the CIA triad, identifying concrete milestones, and balancing dependencies to ensure a synchronized rollout. This talk provides an overview of the Working Group's structure, its deliverables to date, planned next steps, and practical ways in which the audience can contribute to this vital initiative. | Blue hall Collaborative Efforts to support migration to PQCA panel discussion that shares examples of how over 55 different organizations have worked collaborated within the NCCoE Migration to PQC project to demonstrate in either the use cryptographic visibility to support risk management management decisions for migration actions or how performing demonstrations using PQC for interoperability and benchmarking informs PKI system owners to start using PQC algorithms. Bill Newhouse, the NCCoE Migration to PQC lead, will moderate a panel with 3 (or maybe 4) collaborators who have been working on implementing PQC algorithms in PKI systems (such as US Gov't PIV card) | Room A (2) PQC PKI: The Good, the Broken, and the Hybrid2025 was a year full of preparations for deploying PQC in practice. Standards, software libraries, HSMs, a lot of everything was updated to support PQC algorithms. PQC 2026 started with a lot of PQC capable components and a statement like, "It's OK to have not acted YET. 2026 will be the last time this can be said". At the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026 was also the time for great confusion. As organizations started to ponder on the next practical steps, they had to make decisions on what algorithms to use, hybrid solutions or not, and in the case of hybrids what type of hybrid PKI. Have companies deployed PQC in production by now? The answer is yes, production deployment have started. Decisions have been made and some earlier thoughts had to be dismissed. This presentation will highlight PQC PKI choices and hierarchies based on some real world decisions. Architecture, algorithms, and combinations. What has been chosen and why. And maybe even more interesting, what didn't work and why? The presenters do not claim to have seen all PQC PKI deployments of 2026, but we have seen a few, and this is real world experience from those. | |||||
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CET | Red hall Post-Quantum HSMs: Shipped, Validated, or Roadmap?Post-quantum cryptography has moved from standardization to procurement and deployment, with HSM providers central to what customers can implement. This panel brings providers together to distinguish what is available and validated today from what remains on a roadmap, and to explain what customers should require now. The timing is no longer abstract. In the United States, Executive Order 14412 directs the FAR Council to propose post-quantum FIPS requirements for covered contractors by December 31, 2030, while federal high-value assets and high-impact systems must transition key establishment by that date and digital signatures by 2031. In the European Union, the Coordinated Implementation Roadmap expects national strategies and cryptographic inventories to be underway, and transition planning and pilots to have begun, by December 31, 2026, with high-risk use cases transitioned by the end of 2030. The Cyber Resilience Act adds product-security and vulnerability-handling obligations that will influence HSM procurement. Buyers therefore face an immediate question: how can they procure platforms today without creating lock-in, revalidation costs, or another hardware migration later? Panelists will address FIPS 140-3 validation and EUCC/Common Criteria certification, including EAL4 and applicable augmented assurance components, for HSMs supporting ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA; firmware versions and approved operating modes; standards-based crypto-agile interfaces; hybrid key and certificate handling; partition and key portability; and audit evidence. They will also discuss why migrations stall at cryptographic discovery and what customers should expect from vendors on hardware provenance, supply-chain dependencies, and delivery timelines. Attendees will leave with practical criteria for separating deployable capability from roadmap claims, writing stronger procurement requirements, and identifying choices that could create lock-in or require later revalidation. | Blue hall Project Hail Merkle: Rethinking Qualified Trust Services with Merkle Tree CertificatesDigital trust is entering a new phase. For decades, certificates have been the invisible backbone of secure digital interactions: reliable, proven, and essential. But the environment around them is changing fast. Trust ecosystems are becoming larger, more connected, more automated, and more demanding. The question is no longer only how we protect trust. It is how we scale it, prove it, and govern it in a world of growing complexity. This talk explores the emerging concept of Merkle Tree Certificates and asks a fundamental question: could this be the next major step in the evolution of digital trust, especially for qualified trust services? Merkle-tree-based approaches promise a new way of thinking about certificates. By embedding certificate-related information into cryptographically protected structures, they can enable more efficient proofs, greater transparency, and new models for validation at scale. What sounds like a technical refinement may in fact signal something much bigger: a shift from isolated certificate objects to more dynamic, auditable, and internet-scale trust architectures. For the world of qualified trust services, this is especially significant. Here, trust is never just a technical matter. It is also legal certainty, regulatory compliance, operational reliability, and public confidence. That is why the real opportunity, and the real challenge, lies not only in the cryptography itself, but in the question of how such new models could fit into highly regulated trust environments. Can innovation deliver more transparency and scalability without weakening assurance, accountability, or supervision? The talk connects these developments to the future of qualified electronic signatures, seals, website authentication, and emerging wallet-based ecosystems. It highlights both the promise and the unresolved questions: interoperability, standardization, liability, governance, and the broader impact on trust frameworks that were built for a different era. Ultimately, this session is not just about a new certificate concept. It is about the future architecture of trust. As digital infrastructures evolve, trust services must evolve with them. Merkle Tree Certificates may be one of the technologies that help define that next chapter, where trust becomes not only secure, but also scalable, transparent, and ready for the demands of the next digital decade. | Room A (2)Tutorial PQC Regulation and Guidance GloballyPQC guidance varies by country and by industry. Some countries publish short policy papers, others provide detailed cryptographic recommendations, and even PQC migration handbooks. We are also seeing the development of sovereign PQC algorithms and standards. This tutorial gives an overview of the PQC and cryptographic guidance that is currently available, highlights common themes, and identifies significant differences. Designed for managers and technical architects planning for PQC migration, especially those working in multinational organizations. It is also suitable for policy makers and regulators to help them understand the changing global landscape, and developers of cryptographic products and services will also benefit. | Room B (5) Quantum-Ready for BFSI in the ASEAN RegionThis session shares real experience working with MODA and FSC in Taiwan, and DICT and BSP in the Philippines, to understand their guidelines and roadmaps for supporting the Taiwanese and Philippine BFSI sectors in migrating to PQC, starting from helping them become quantum-ready. It shares real use cases covering how large national banks plan to build a golden inventory, what should be considered when preparing them to start PQC inventory and assessment, and which approach and methodology they adopt to start the assessment and the journey of PQC migration. For example, most of the banks would only adopt an agentless tool for cryptographic asset scanning; the session looks at which areas they usually start with and how they manage the data afterwards, as well as the role of the national cybersecurity authority and the central bank in driving this. | Room C (8) PQC Migration for European Public InstitutionsCryptanalytically Relevant Quantum Computing (CRQC) is approaching increasingly fast, as the latest developments in hardware, software, and the application of decrypting algorithms show. But where would adversaries with a CRQC find their first targets? The public sector, involving many different institutions with huge amounts of confidential information (from monetary and financial, through organizational and strategic, to health and security data) is home to high-value targets with data retention periods that make harvest-now-decrypt-later worth the effort. The complexity of IT systems, already heterogeneous between the different institutions and even more so between European countries, and the need for reliability and trustworthiness of this backbone of our societies, make migration a highly difficult undertaking. This is a challenge Q-PrEP is here to help tackle, in and with its community of cybersecurity agencies, public sector organizations, their private sector providers, and cybersecurity researchers on PQC and related aspects. A clear strategy, not unguided disruption of safety and secrecy, is needed and advanced by and within Q-PrEP. To give the audience an impression of the project and its community, the presentation by the Q-PrEP project team covers an introduction to the approach and measures taken by Q-PrEP; the Q-PrEP Community as the centerpiece of the project; integration of Q-PrEP into the European PQC ecosystem; key aspects of the PQC migration in European public organizations and services and how their representatives engage in Q-PrEP; and the direction of Q-PrEP's PQC roadmap for the public sector, Europe-wide. | Room D (9) Trust Me, I'm Random: Zero Trust Entropy for PQCEvery key your cloud HSM or KMS generates relies on one assumption nobody in your SOC can verify: that the RNG feeding it is actually random. That assumption has failed before, in certified hardware, silently, for years. Taiwan's national ID smartcards were FIPS 140-2 Level 2 and Common Criteria certified and still shipped factorable RSA keys, found by outside researchers factoring the public keys, not by the devices and not by the auditors. Debian's OpenSSL entropy bug ran undetected for nearly two years. Someone edited a constant in Juniper's ScreenOS ‘Dual_EC’ parameters and nothing alerted. Post-quantum migration sharpens this: an ML-KEM or ML-DSA private key is exactly as strong as the seed behind it, and we are re-keying the internet on top of black-box entropy right now. Statistical testing cannot save you. A generator whose output an adversary chose in advance passes every SP 800-90B health test and every Dieharder suite, by construction. Certification is a point-in-time snapshot of a device that then runs unobserved in someone else's datacenter for five years. You have no telemetry, no detection, and no forensic trail on the most foundational component in your cryptographic stack. We have solved this shape of problem before, just never here. Reproducible builds and SLSA replaced ‘trust the build server’ with evidence. Certificate Transparency accepted that misissuance cannot be prevented and made it publicly detectable and replayable instead. Remote attestation did it for workloads. Each was the same move: stop asking operators to be trustworthy, start requiring them to emit artifacts anyone can check. Entropy is the last link in the chain still running on trust-by-assumption, and it is the link everything else is built on. This talk is about what that move looks like for randomness. I present FQR-CSS, from my peer-reviewed paper in Discover Computing (DOI: 10.1007/s10791-026-09994-y), staying strictly on the part implementable today. The generator is made to prove its own health. Each QRNG node precommits to a seed before the session, then publishes a post-quantum zk-STARK over its classical measurement log asserting that the log satisfies a stated physical predicate: a CHSH score above threshold, a photon-number distribution passing chi-square, measurement bases derived from the pre-committed seed. The raw log never leaves the device. An aggregation layer verifies every proof and runs BFT consensus, so only attested contributions reach the mixer. The client receives randomness plus a Merkle-rooted integrity token it verifies itself and an auditor can replay months later against a transparency log. No new quantum hardware is required: the proofs are over classical logs that commercial QRNGs already emit, using standard post-quantum ZKPs. I walk through reproducible zk-STARK benchmarks and a full latency budget: roughly 396 ms end-to-end for a conservative CHSH attestation over WAN with HotStuff consensus, of which client verification is sub-millisecond. That fits inside high-assurance key generation and disappears behind a pre-verified randomness buffer. The scope is deliberate and I will state it plainly: this is a cryptographic architecture with benchmarked primitives, not a hardware product. It attests entropy provenance at generation time, not that a key was never exfiltrated afterwards. Key Takeaways:
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| 5 min CET | Blue hall Practical Implementation of Hardware-Separated Composite Signatures for Large-Scale PKI During the PQC Migration PeriodThe transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) presents a significant challenge for organizations operating large-scale Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs). While PQC standards are becoming available, replacing vast numbers of deployed hardware tokens such as smart cards remains operationally expensive and time-consuming. In this session, we present our implementation experience with the IETF LAMPS draft "Composite ML-DSA for Use in X.509 Public Key Infrastructure" in a hardware-separated environment for large-scale PKI migration. The approach combines existing smart cards holding traditional signature keys (e.g., RSA) with server-side Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) providing PQC signature capabilities (e.g., ML-DSA), enabling organizations to begin introducing PQC without requiring immediate replacement of end-user hardware. We discuss three representative risks observed during implementation and evaluation: cross-protocol signature composition, unintended reuse of composite-signature keys for single-algorithm signatures, and device impersonation across separated trust domains, and present a device-binding architecture that addresses them while maintaining compatibility with the IETF LAMPS composite signature framework. We also evaluate the potential operational impact of this approach using a large-scale PKI migration model involving tens of millions of certificates, and share architectural considerations, implementation experiences, and validation results from a prototype built using cloud-based HSM services and commercially available PKI smart cards. | Room B (5) Securing the Internet of Things for the Quantum EraThe rapid growth of the IoT has transformed critical sectors such as healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, energy, and smart cities. However, IoT security is deeply dependent on public key infrastructures (PKI) for device identity, authentication, certificate management, secure onboarding, key establishment, and firmware validation. The emergence of quantum computing threatens many of the public-key algorithms underpinning today's PKI, creating a long-term security risk for IoT deployments with constrained resources and long operational lifetimes. This talk focuses on the transition of IoT PKI towards PQC. It examines the implications of PQC for certificates, certificate chains, device provisioning, authentication protocols, secure updates, and lifecycle management at scale. Particular attention is given to the practical challenges of deploying larger post-quantum keys and signatures on constrained IoT devices and bandwidth-limited networks. The talk also covers hybrid certificates, crypto-agile PKI architectures, migration strategies, and interoperability with existing IoT security standards. | Room C (8) ETSI/EU PQC updateWhile the EU set up its roadmap for a PQC transition and now is ready for another standardization project regarding PQC involving industry uptakes (development, interoperability, digital services, …), ETSI is preparing for the changes that need to be made. Added to the current QSC WG on TC CYBER, ETSI has created a new TC called QT (Quantum Technologies) to deal with all quantum stuff. While this is really a boost on the matter, it does not solve the specific problems faced at TC ESI regarding certificates and signatures. Therefore, ETSI ESI has created a new WG called PQC which deals with all these aspects. This new WG will focus on producing at least 4 TRs (Technical Reports) to evaluate the impact of PQC on ESI standards. These TRs will cover the areas within the ESI framework, which are:
| Room D (9) Crypto-Agility in Practice: What Breaks When Introducing Post-Quantum AlgorithmsPost-quantum cryptography is often discussed in terms of algorithm design and standardization, but integrating new cryptographic primitives into existing software systems exposes a different class of engineering challenges. Many production systems assume fixed algorithm identities, compact key and signature sizes, and stable serialization formats. These assumptions are often implicit and only become visible when new algorithms are introduced. This talk examines practical issues encountered when introducing post-quantum algorithms into identity and access management systems. The discussion is based on implementation experience in both a newly designed platform and an existing legacy system, where crypto-agility had to be introduced incrementally without breaking existing functionality. The session identifies common failure points, including limitations in cryptographic libraries, constraints imposed by protocol message sizes, incompatibilities in token validation logic, and operational issues that arise when multiple algorithms must be supported simultaneously. Beyond identifying problems, the talk focuses on the engineering responses used to address them. These include abstraction approaches for algorithm handling, strategies for managing backward compatibility, and techniques for validating mixed-algorithm environments during transition periods. The goal is to highlight the often-overlooked system-level implications of cryptographic change. Attendees will gain a grounded understanding of how post-quantum migration affects real systems and what design considerations are necessary to reduce disruption during cryptographic evolution. | Room E (10) The Layer Nobody Monitors: Entropy Failures in PKI, from Factorable Keys to Silent Hardware FaultsThe randomness PKI assumes is there fails silently — certificates look valid, keys look fine, and nothing alerts until someone goes looking. This session walks four real entropy failures and the thread connecting them. The 2012 shared-factor research (Heninger et al.; Lenstra et al.) found a meaningful fraction of live TLS and SSH keys factorable by simple GCD, because devices generated keys at first boot before the entropy pool filled. The Debian OpenSSL collapse reduced a keyspace to a few thousand possibilities. Taiwan's national smartcards produced factorable keys despite FIPS and Common Criteria certification. And AMD's 2025 Zen 5 RDSEED fault (CVE-2025-62626) returned zeros while signaling success — a hardware source failing silently on current CPUs. The lesson isn't hardware versus software. It's runtime health-testing, validation that exercises the noise source, and no single point of dependence — as PQC and short cert lifetimes multiply randomness demand. | |||
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CET | Red hall Where the World Stands: A Government Leaders’ Panel on the PQC TransitionA digital economy runs on trust, and that trust runs on cryptography. The signatures, certificates, and encrypted channels that underpin banking, identity, commerce, and communication are invisible until they fail — and the quantum threat puts all of them in question at once. The exposure is often discussed in geopolitical terms, but the consequences are economic and societal: markets, supply chains, public services, and the everyday transactions that modern life depends on. This is not a problem governments can solve alone. And it is not one organizations can afford to defer. This panel brings together senior representatives from national cybersecurity agencies and government PQC programmes to share where their programmes stand, what they are seeing in the market, and what they expect ahead. Are migration timelines holding — or are they moving? That is the question every leadership team will be asking, and this panel offers a unique opportunity to hear how governments are thinking about it. There will be plenty of room for questions and interaction with the panellists. | Blue hall Making ML-DSA Work for Machine-to-Machine mTLS: Field Notes from an End-to-End Post-Quantum PKIMost post-quantum migration programs have done the easy part - hybrid key exchange - and then hit a wall at authentication. Getting ML-DSA certificates working for real machine-to-machine identity, with a PKI that can issue, renew, and revoke them, is where timelines slip: the certificates are large, lifecycle tooling is immature, and almost no one has run mutual TLS where both sides authenticate with post-quantum credentials. This is a practitioner field report from an organization that has built and now operates exactly that - an end-to-end post-quantum machine-identity stack: an ML-DSA-65 CA hierarchy, post-quantum-only mutual TLS enforced at the edge, automated enrollment and short-lived issuance, and OCSP/CRL revocation that takes effect in real time. We share what it actually took, so teams planning the authentication phase of their own migration know what they are walking into. Attendees leave with: a realistic picture of the authentication half of PQC migration - what is production-ready today and what is still blocked on standards (IETF LAMPS composite certificates, post-quantum identity tokens); where ML-DSA certificate and signature sizes actually cause problems - handshake payloads, buffers, issuance throughput - measured against classical TLS 1.3; how to tell a genuinely post-quantum-only deployment from a post-quantum key exchange sitting in front of classical certificates, and how to verify it; a certificate-lifecycle model for machine identity - constrained enrollment, automated issuance, real-time revocation - and the operational decisions that matter; and a practical set of questions to put to your CAs, HSM vendors, and platform teams before committing to an approach. The session is for PKI, platform, and security teams responsible for the machine-identity and mTLS portion of their post-quantum migration. It assumes working knowledge of TLS 1.3 and certificate PKI; no prior post-quantum background is required. | ||||||
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| 5 min CET | Red hall The European Roadmap on Post-Quantum Cryptography: Looking Back and Moving ForwardIn April 2024, the European Commission issued a Recommendation on Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), calling on Member States to adopt a coordinated and harmonized approach to the transition towards quantum-resistant cryptographic systems. This led to the establishment of a dedicated PQC workstream within the NIS Cooperation Group, co-chaired by France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Bringing together representatives from nearly all EU Member States, the workstream developed the European roadmap for the coordinated migration to PQC, published in June 2025. The workstream continues to support Member States by fostering collaboration, exchanging experiences, and addressing common challenges related to the transition to PQC. In this talk, we will review the progress made since the publication of the roadmap, discuss key developments and lessons learned, and provide an outlook on the remaining priorities and future activities of the workstream. | Blue hall Beware of Downgrade Attacks during the Migration to Quantum ResistanceDuring the quantum-resistant migration’s transitionary phase there is a need for backwards compatibility and manageability. This means that old and new cryptography may be in use at the same time, creating a real risk of downgrade attacks. This talk sets out the problem of limiting downgrade risk during migration, focused on the use-case of end-to-end authenticated commands from an authority to a device, which is a critical use-case for managing infrastructure and devices. We pose several strategies for migration and provide practical ways to mitigate and manage the downgrade risk and minimise the exposure time window. In this use-case the problem is compounded when commands are sent one-way and do not receive a response, and when it takes time to upgrade authorities and devices. Furthermore, with new quantum-resistant standards emerging and best-practice for selecting algorithms and parameter sets likely to evolve, this transition will likely not be the last. Planning today’s migration with cryptographic agility in mind to reduce the downgrade risk during future changes is therefore important. Greater recognition of the real challenges of the downgrade risk and how to address it will equip vendors and IT managers with strategies to reduce their exposure and manage risks during their quantum-resistant migration and future cryptographic transitions. By setting out the problem we also hope to establish a foundation for further research in this area that many will depend on. | ||||||
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| 5 min CET | Red hall Conference closingThe chairs bring the conference to a close with key takeaways, a call to action, and what comes next for the PKI Consortium's PQC work. | |||||||
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For further information, contact the PKI Consortium at contact (at) pkic.org.
