For X-Road to maintain its foundational promise of a trustworthy digital ecosystem, a rigorous, forward-looking assessment is mandatory. To support NIIS in the migration of X-Road to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), this report presents the results of the X-Road study on the transition to quantum-resistant cryptography.
The primary objective of this study is to study the migration process to PQC and risk assessment in the X-Road data exchange layer. As a result, this study aimed to identify the new threats that quantum computing brings to current cryptographic standards and how X-Road should be modified to protect against these threats.
The study is driven by the near-future availability of large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers (QC), which can leverage Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms to break current public-key infrastructure and significantly weaken symmetric key schemes. The urgency is driven by the “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” threat, which exposes sensitive data with long retention periods to immediate compromise once the QC is implemented.