Defence

Post-quantum cryptography

New encryption designed to stay secure once large quantum computers can break today's public-key algorithms.

RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography, which protect most key exchanges and signatures today, could be broken by a large enough quantum computer. Post-quantum algorithms (such as NIST's ML-KEM and ML-DSA) rely on different maths that quantum computers are not known to speed up. The rush is partly "harvest now, decrypt later": traffic recorded today could be decrypted in the future.