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 migration to PQC.
The primary objective of this study is to examine the impact of post-quantum computation and cryptography on the X-Road data exchange layer. As a result, this study aimed to identify the new threats that post-quantum computation brings 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.