Mirror of Zenodo record 19655682. Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19655682 Version: 1.2 License: cc-by-4.0 Original record: https://zenodo.org/records/19655682 Zenodo description: Version 1.2.0 is a major restructuring of the Quantum-Safe Migration Playbook with three goals: make the content usable as a retrieval-augmented AI knowledge base, tighten evaluation discipline, and update all dated facts to April 2026. What's new in v1.2.0 Structural changes Fact-ID indexing: every atomic claim now has a stable §N.M identifier for precise cross-reference and citation. Explicit scope block at the top of the corpus, listing what's covered and — critically — what's out of scope. This is what allows a downstream AI advisor to refuse out-of-scope questions instead of improvising. Cross-reference lines at the end of each section pointing to related fact IDs. Provenance block: every dated or numeric claim in the corpus is listed at the bottom with its source and a re-check cadence. Content updates (April 2026) §1.2: NIST FIPS 203 (ML-KEM), FIPS 204 (ML-DSA), FIPS 205 (SLH-DSA) finalized August 13, 2024; HQC selected March 2025; FIPS 206 (FN-DSA/FALCON) in development. §1.3: NSA CNSA 2.0 timelines specified by category — software/firmware signing and network equipment by 2030; browsers, servers, cloud, and operating systems by 2033. §1.4 (new): compressed Q-Day estimates. Neutral-atom architectures and improved error correction have cut the qubit count needed to break P-256. Cloudflare now targets 2029 for full internal PQ readiness. §2.1: Cloudflare reports 52% of human-initiated web traffic using post-quantum hybrid key agreement (December 2025 data), up from 29% at the start of the year. §2.3 (new): the authentication gap. Key agreement is largely solved; public PQ certificates are not yet broadly available; CA/Browser Forum has not finalized the hybrid certificate format. §4: replaced unsourced latency percentage with mechanism-based description. §6.4 (new): Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOM) concept. §9.3: sharpened vendor validation criteria with FIPS 140-3 and NIST CAVP references. Evaluation suite Expanded from 4 queries to 15 golden queries plus 6 distractor queries. Each query has explicit pass AND fail criteria, testable against paraphrased responses. Distractor queries test scope enforcement: QKD, quantum physics, vendor recommendations, exact Q-Day predictions, legal advice, general crypto tutorials. Integration guide (new) Dedicated INTEGRATION.md with a ready-to-paste system prompt for a retrieval-augmented runtime. Ingestion guidance (corpus fits in system context for models with ≥8K windows; chunking patterns for larger deployments). Refresh cadence tied to the Provenance block. Version history v1.1.0 — initial Zenodo release. v1.2.0 — restructured, fact-indexed, expanded evaluation suite, updated to April 2026 standards and deployment data.
Mirror of Zenodo record 19655682. Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19655682 Version: 1.2 License: cc-by-4.0 Original record: https://zenodo.org/records/19655682 Zenodo description: Version 1.2.0 is a major restructuring of the Quantum-Safe Migration Playbook with three goals: make the content usable as a retrieval-augmented AI knowledge base, tighten evaluation discipline, and update all dated facts to April 2026. What's new in v1.2.0 Structural changes Fact-ID indexing: every atomic claim now has a stable §N.M identifier for precise cross-reference and citation. Explicit scope block at the top of the corpus, listing what's covered and — critically — what's out of scope. This is what allows a downstream AI advisor to refuse out-of-scope questions instead of improvising. Cross-reference lines at the end of each section pointing to related fact IDs. Provenance block: every dated or numeric claim in the corpus is listed at the bottom with its source and a re-check cadence. Content updates (April 2026) §1.2: NIST FIPS 203 (ML-KEM), FIPS 204 (ML-DSA), FIPS 205 (SLH-DSA) finalized August 13, 2024; HQC selected March 2025; FIPS 206 (FN-DSA/FALCON) in development. §1.3: NSA CNSA 2.0 timelines specified by category — software/firmware signing and network equipment by 2030; browsers, servers, cloud, and operating systems by 2033. §1.4 (new): compressed Q-Day estimates. Neutral-atom architectures and improved error correction have cut the qubit count needed to break P-256. Cloudflare now targets 2029 for full internal PQ readiness. §2.1: Cloudflare reports 52% of human-initiated web traffic using post-quantum hybrid key agreement (December 2025 data), up from 29% at the start of the year. §2.3 (new): the authentication gap. Key agreement is largely solved; public PQ certificates are not yet broadly available; CA/Browser Forum has not finalized the hybrid certificate format. §4: replaced unsourced latency percentage with mechanism-based description. §6.4 (new): Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOM) concept. §9.3: sharpened vendor validation criteria with FIPS 140-3 and NIST CAVP references. Evaluation suite Expanded from 4 queries to 15 golden queries plus 6 distractor queries. Each query has explicit pass AND fail criteria, testable against paraphrased responses. Distractor queries test scope enforcement: QKD, quantum physics, vendor recommendations, exact Q-Day predictions, legal advice, general crypto tutorials. Integration guide (new) Dedicated INTEGRATION.md with a ready-to-paste system prompt for a retrieval-augmented runtime. Ingestion guidance (corpus fits in system context for models with ≥8K windows; chunking patterns for larger deployments). Refresh cadence tied to the Provenance block. Version history v1.1.0 — initial Zenodo release. v1.2.0 — restructured, fact-indexed, expanded evaluation suite, updated to April 2026 standards and deployment data.
Abstract: This study investigates quantum-safe modernization strategies for critical infrastructure by proposing a rigorous post-quantum (PQ) migration and verification framework that treats cryptographic transition as a safety-critical, multi-system engineering program rather than a routine software upgrade. The core argument is that infrastructure operators face two coupled risks: (i) cryptanalytic obsolescence of classical public-key systems under cryptographically relevant quantum computing and (ii) operational fragility introduced by large-scale cryptographic refactoring across heterogeneous assets such as industrial control systems, substation automation, telecommunications backhaul, and safety instrumentation. To address both, the framework integrates inventory-driven migration planning, hybrid-mode interoperability controls, and verification evidence that is continuously auditable across the asset lifecycle. The manuscript operationalizes verification as a chain of assurance spanning algorithm selection, protocol composition, implementation conformance, and deployment governance. Standardized PQ primitives (e.g., ML‑KEM for key establishment and ML‑DSA/SLH‑DSA for signa-tures) are used as reference baselines, with explicit attention to size and performance implications that alter network and device constraints. Real-data collection is defined as standards-backed parameter extraction, vendor/firmware artifact inspection, and protocol telemetry capture in representative environments. Results are reported as decision-facing tables and figures that quantify payload expansion, transition milestones, and published performance overheads, alongside interpretation of their operational significance for safety and resilience. Keywords: post-quantum cryptography; ML-KEM; ML-DSA; SLH-DSA; CNSA 2.0; critical infrastructure; migration governance; protocol verification; conformance testing; cryptographic agility
Secure post-quantum migration requires resistant implementations, authenti-2cated protocols and replaceable systems. This structured critical review synthesises3standards, implementation-security studies, benchmarks, protocol specifications and4deployment measurements available through 19 September 2026. Four instruments5separate mathematical security from implementation assurance, resource feasibility6and organisational readiness: a deployment-security taxonomy, a vulnerability-class7assurance framework, a cross-layer bottleneck map and a layered readiness frame-8work. Comparisons preserve platform, protection and workload context; incompatible9measurements are not pooled. Three boundaries recur: repairing an exploit does10not establish resistance to its vulnerability class; fast primitives do not establish11acceptable end-to-end performance; and hybrid key exchange does not establish12post-quantum authentication or lifecycle readiness. Specification arithmetic makes13the third boundary concrete: two transmitted ML-DSA-65 certificates plus Certifi-14cateVerify contain 13.8 kB of raw cryptographic material, against a 0.32 kB ECDSA15P-256 baseline; the increase is 5.95 times the raw key-share increase for hybrid16over classical X25519 key exchange. These counts exclude encoding and protocol17overhead. A firmware profile screens all 15 FIPS 204/205 signature parameter sets,18retains ML-DSA-65, and shows how the outcome shifts under varied thresholds and19non-FIPS comparators. Source-linked records and executable calculations make the20procedure inspectable. The instruments support conditional engineering judgements,21not independently validated security scores.
FIPS 203, 204 and 205 closed the algorithmic gap in post-quantum cryptography (PQC); the production gap -- hybrid combiners, conformance evidence, migration tooling, stateful signing, protocol helpers -- remains open. A methodology that scores it must not choose its own dimensions, so we anchor nine to external requirements (CNSA 2.0, CMVP, the TNO CADI survey, the IETF hybrid draft). We present quantum-safe, a hybrid-by-default Python library built against this rubric, and an audit of nine PQC libraries (September 2026). The exercise can lower our own score, and it does.
Hybrid combiners exist in three of six verifiable libraries, not the one a March-2026 snapshot found. Discovery and inventory tooling is the sharper gap: none of seven audited libraries has it; quantum-safe adds a CycloneDX CBOM. Only Bouncy Castle holds a CMVP FIPS 140-3 certificate; quantum-safe reports 225/225 runnable ACVP known-answer cases, which is conformance evidence, not validation. Bouncy Castle also supports LMS and XMSS where quantum-safe has LMS only, and quantum-safe's defaults sit below the CNSA 2.0 parameter sets; we score both against ourselves.
Every benchmark figure is computed from archived raw runs (bootstrap intervals over 15 runs). A full X25519 + ML-KEM-768 handshake takes a median of 231 microseconds under Docker/Linux (95% interval 218-250), 5.3x an X25519-only handshake and 0.46-2.3% of a typical TLS 1.3 budget. Throughput is flat from 100 to 5,000 threads but below the single-thread rate: threads do not speed up the hybrid path, although liboqs does release the GIL in longer calls (ML-DSA-65 signing scales 2.6x on four threads). Timing side channels are treated in a companion paper.
A 20-chapter beginner's guide to quantum computing that starts with an honest question — why don't we have quantum computers yet? The guide teaches the standard curriculum accurately, explains why the standard approach faces a thermodynamic wall (a 20,000-fold cooling gap that is Carnot-limited), and introduces the ultrametric alternative: passive geometric fault tolerance on Bruhat-Tits trees, with DOI-registered evidence, computationally validated error thresholds 75 times higher than surface codes, and three falsifiable predictions. This is the v1.2 edition (August 2026). Five quantitative statements from the May 2026 edition are corrected, each verified by an independent computation deposited with this record (artifacts/verification/verify_guide_claims.py, 35 checks, all passing; see Appendix B). Appendix A records the research program's progress since May 2026, including a trapped-ion falsifiability register, an audit of a 2026 no-go theorem on quantum error correction and quantum Darwinism, and the program's own correction on prime-valuation readings of quantum codes. This deposit includes the complete source set: manuscript, HTML, PDF, references (BibTeX), citation audit, project plan, license, and verification artifacts. v1.2.1 (August 2026): post-publication audit corrections. Chapter 20's summary now lists seven open problems (including the QEC–Darwinism tradeoff); the LHC temperature comparison is marked approximate (95×, rounded); Appendix A correction #5 completed; the citation audit's internal-reference count corrected; open problem 7 carries its numeric bound (F_L > 0.874). No quantitative claims changed. v1.2.2 (August 2026): deposit-file corrections. LICENSE now contains the full CC BY 4.0 International legal code, and README.md is the deposit manifest (a project-blueprint README was attached in v1.2.1 by an automation error). No content changes.
Technical readiness record for the SQUIRL OS prototype stating its position against the post-quantum cryptography standards and deadlines in force as of October 30, 2026. Version 1.1. NIST published the final version of NISTIR 8547 on 2026-10-27 and withdrew the 2024 draft the same day. The headline dates held: quantum-vulnerable public-key algorithms are deprecated after 2030 and disallowed under NIST standards and guidelines after 2035. What changed is scope. The final report deprecates every approved classical strength after 2030, including P-256, P-384, RSA-3072 and Ed25519, where the draft deprecated only 112-bit parameter sets. Version 1.1 closes two CNSA 2.0 gaps identified in version 1.0. First, the signature parameter set: NSA names ML-DSA-87 at every classification level, so ML-DSA-65 does not satisfy the suite and the canonical signature is now ML-DSA-87. Second, SLH-DSA: NSA states that SLH-DSA, while hash-based, is not part of CNSA 2.0 and is not approved for any use in National Security Systems, and that the only approved hash-based options for firmware and software validation are LMS or XMSS per SP 800-208. Version 1.1 adds a full CNSA 2.0 conformance table covering AES-256, SHA-384/512, ML-KEM-1024, ML-DSA-87, LMS/XMSS, HashML-DSA and SLH-DSA. The record keeps its central distinction: correcting the approved algorithm set is not the same as re-keying running components. The remaining open items are stated explicitly, including the implementation audit, a firmware validation path, hybrid key establishment specification, and an inventory of non-migratable systems. No certification and no compliance attestation is claimed. SQUIRL OS is a prototype provided for educational and research purposes.